Read4Me

Let your Mac do the talking. Read4Me reads text out loud, it can save to audio, and it can even save e-books (ePub) as AudioBooks so you can listen on the go! Use Read4Me for teaching, rehearsals and language study. Proof read your document by listening, that catches issues where spell checker won't help. And it is very easy to start, stop and select another voice. Set your preferred speed of reading to estimate the time to read the text during a presentation. You can even save the audio to a sound file. Create voice-overs for presentations and movies.

Read4Me will speak text in a variety of voices in 27 languages and also English dialects such as British, Irish and Scottish, using optional installs of Mac OSX.

Actually it is a text editor with spell check, printing, saving to Rich Text Format as well as Plain Text. Listen to various formats of documents: Microsoft Word, plain text, Open Office, RTF, HTML and DRM-free ePub books, and save them all as AudioBook.

Voice Coach is a unique feature of Read4me that allows you to embed pauses, pitch & rate changes into your text. Voice Coach tagging is essential in creating AudioBooks for poetry. Tagging is not always fully supported by all voices, but the classic voices can even sing with this feature (almost), other effects work best on the novelty voices.

* NOTE
You can download these voices from Apple for free, like this: System Preferences -> Speech -> System Voice -> Customize...

Available are high quality voices for Arabic, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish. Many voices have been added or updated in the latest version of Mac OS X. The Read4me support page on my website has a movie that shows exactly how to do this.

** NOTE
Highlighting works on OS X Mountain Lion or Mavericks after updating voices.

DISCLAIMER
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard does NOT have free international voices. Read4Me is independent of speech engine, some engines deliver more features than others. There is no guarantee that 3rd party voices, like InfoVox or Cepstral work properly. Some InfoVox work, others don't due to the new sandbox in OSX. You might see 'iVoxSynth' or 'CereVoice3Synthesizer' in crash reports when you use certain features like tagging, don't blame Read4me.

COPYRIGHT Notice
This software uses code from libsox (version 14.3.2 without externals)
licensed under the LGPLv2.1 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html)
The Sox source code can be downloaded at http://sox.sf.net