TextAloudComments on:

By: ken white

ken white — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:02:35 +0000

Want to thank everyone who left comments, it has been a great learning experience for us. For anyone who wants to followup with me, my email address is ken@nextup.com and I’d love to hear from any of your on your suggestions and problems. A few common things I heard that I’d like to address.

1) The basic voices are bad.

I agree completely. The 15 minute review suggested instead of selling a $29.95 version we should sell a $59.95 version that includes at least one good voice. Actually, the most common version we sell is $54.95 and includes 2 AT&T Voices, Mike and Crystal. Samples of those at
http://nextup.com/TextAloud/SpeechEngine/voices.html

But, we also need the lower entry price for a part of our user base, who are generally impaired either visually or have reading difficulties, and are often on fixed incomes.

With the better sounding voices, file size (range from 100mb to 600mb) and licensing terms with the companies we license the voices from prevent us from putting trial versions of the voices out with the download. And, while we’d love to be able to give away better sounding voices, we have to pay for them. Companies like Nuance and AT&T spend millions developing these voices, mostly for use in big call centers (like when you call the airlines). We’ve worked hard with them to bring these to PC, but we rightfully so have to pay them royalties on each copy we sell, thus they aren’t cheap and we can’t give them away, but we do make them affordable.

2) This was just a trial version

We actually got email from several users who thought it was just a trial version or that they should have gotten a registration code. Remember with GOTD programs, you must run the activate.exe program in the .zip, and this will load registration details into the windows registry.

3) Any other problems you’ve had, certain features or toolbars, or whatever not working, like the disk space issues, are likely bugs or installer issues. It happens. If you email us at support@nextup.com we should be able to help quickly with that.

Anyway, thanks for all the feedback and feel free to email me.

Ken

By: Claudia

Claudia — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:10:34 +0000

I just love TextAloud and agree that Microsoft’s Sam is not very nice to listen, but there are other voices wich are really human sounding.
I’d love to know what serial was used to active this great software…

Thanks GAOTD

By: Jim Parsons

Jim Parsons — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 11:38:19 +0000

Fantastic little program. Tried it out on plain text files and an ebook in PDF format I will most definitely buy it, and an upgraded voice set so that I can install it on both my desktop and my laptop.

I can see a whole plethora of ways to put it to very practical use.

By: chuck

chuck — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 09:32:56 +0000

One more thing, it took some configuring on my part to get the Firefox plugin to work. I do have the newest version. That may be the reason, dunno. But it works great in Firefox too.

By: chuck

chuck — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 09:29:17 +0000

Maybe I am just easy to please, but I think this program works just great. I dont understand why some had to dowload Mike, or Mary. It was already on my computer, then came Sam. Anyway, Sam sounds a lil like Dr. Sbato from my Commodore 64 years ago, but still better. I love it. I can open my email, highlight the text, hit hotkeys, close my email, and listen to all that I highlighted. MSIE works even better. This is great, and I would have bought the software had I known it was this good. I dont feel that the upgraded voices is needed, but may purchase them later. A great deal even if purchasing more voices. Havent looked yet, but I hope that todays giveaway isnt a screensaver.

By: hinews

hinews — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 08:28:17 +0000

I once tried TextAloud Trial version and it is a good software..but unfortunately I didnot have the connection yesterday,i missed such great software… :(

By: BoRegard

BoRegard — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 06:45:32 +0000

This is a great thread for STT, TTS, speech engines, making TextAloud work properly, and related program references. There are 9 links and direct info that I haven’t found before, and I have searched this stuff for many hours over many months. Thanks to all who contributed.

I, too, can not find the TextAloud toolbar in firefox. Thanks to CRoss, #93, for the Speakit speech plug-in reference.

I have one more problem with TextAloud. The maximum volume blew out my little PC speakers after maybe 10 minutes. All computer sounds are VERY loud, like minimize/maximize window, etc. The voice is the stock MS Mary voice, but WAY, WAY louder than on any other TTS program. And then, after plugging in new speakers, I have no sounds at all. Still working on it. If someone has similar issue and solved it, please respond ASAP — next 15 minutes!

By: Tony

Tony — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 06:39:10 +0000

Also try Balabolka from:

http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

By: BoRegard

BoRegard — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 06:29:17 +0000

This is a great thread for TTS, STT, speech engine, making TextAloud work properly, and “related” program references. There are 10-15 links and direct info here that I haven’t found before, and I have searched many hours over many m

By: kefin

kefin — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 05:26:31 +0000

Pretty much same as #92. But when the voice reads the intro it keeps stating that this is a trial version and if i want more voices i would have to buy the full version…Anyways beside that Why would you sell a progam with a voice that you can barely understand and charge people for a voice that would actually work and sound good???? oh wait ya that must be it…MONEY!!!! Nice program software there guys…I bet they love gaotd people..Here take a free program from us…but if you want it to work right yourll pay us money…sweet deal