Text to speech to mp3

[X-53mph]

Hi guys,

In my day job, I'm a language teacher and I've got a lot of students who need to practice their listening skills. I've got this book that I use all the time which, unfortunately, is missing the audio cd. There is an audio script for the listenings which I usually read out, however, I want them to hear voices other than mine. It's a very old book and out of circulation, but I was thinking of recreating the audio tracks using the audio script via a text to speech converter.

I can see that there are a number of paid services online that do very good readings. Microsoft Word also has a pretty good Audio Reading tool. However, to get the MP3, you either need to pay or I would need to record the audio onto an external MP3 player (not too hard, but a bit time consuming).

Does anyone know of an easier method?

Cheers 

Btw: I hope I've been clear in my explanation.

[X-53mph]

I'm going to answer myself here.

I found a fantastic Ai text to speech site called https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/

Some of the voices are so close to realistic (US Male Davis & US Female Nancy) that, if you punctuate your text well enough, they sound real.  I think Davis is the voice they use for all the Radio and Podcast ads recently.

The site gives you 5 minutes of free text per day. So it's good for short text.

I haven't used their MP3 conversion tool, because I don't want to sign up to another service, so I'm recording to a digital recorder and editing the files. 

I must say, this one service blows all the other ones out the water.

Does anyone know of any others?

[mettelus]

I cannot remember offhand exactly which, but MS and Adobe both had free text-speech readers. I think Google also has one embedded in their book reader app (forget the name now). Pretty sure they were all mobile apps as well (for hands free) rather than computer. Not used any of those more than in passing, and they will only work on certain file formats (by app). Capturing that would be another hurdle.

[Lord Tim]

I decided to give that service a go and got ChatGPT to write me a script to feed it, and, well... you guys decide! I think it's pretty amazing:

A Rebel Pilot Reflects

 

Edited April 19, 2023 by Lord Tim

[abacab]

1 hour ago, pwalpwal said:

yes, and then you need to set up a desktop recorder that records "what you hear" to get the output? good luck!

The free Audacity can record desktop audio as "what you hear". All you need to do is use Windows WASAPI with it, and select "loopback" as your recording device.

https://support.audacityteam.org/basics/recording-desktop-audio

It can easily export MP3 as well.

https://support.audacityteam.org/basics/saving-and-exporting-projects

[OutrageProductions]

I may be late to the party here but I've simultaneously run the DAW, Word (and/or Acrobat) in Text 2 Speech mode and captured the screen with all audio mixed using VB-Meter Banana (with my ASIO drivers as output) and OBS.

Getting the stuff setup was a freakin' PITA, but ran without any glitches during my presentation. Especially with four monitors and trying to remember where I was teaching from.

[X-53mph]

20 hours ago, pwalpwal said:

yes, and then you need to set up a desktop recorder that records "what you hear" to get the output? good luck!

I've been using the computer output jack to digital recorder in. All I need is MP3 quality, so it works fine. It's as difficult as putting a jack in a socket....so no biggy.

[X-53mph]

On 4/19/2023 at 8:36 AM, mettelus said:

I cannot remember offhand exactly which, but MS ..

Yes, the msWord reader is not bad. It is, in fact, one of the voice options on the site I mentioned. The female voice is definitely better than the male one (UK).