Can anyone suggest a good text to speech program for Windows 7.

malcolm

The built in narrator sounds like a robot and none of the hotkeys work. Ideally I want to open a .pdf click some button and the thing starts reading it to me in a not Stephen Hawkings voice.

Visceral

Lol, thats the laziest thing i have ever heard reading would do you good.
Text 2 speech isnt really developed to the stage where it sounds natural. I mean the current version is slightly better than e sythesizer but not much.

Lamont

There's tons of engines and usually, the good ones cost money, and only supply the engines (you gotta do the integration). Then you gotta buy voices. With that said...

http://www.nextup.com/

malcolm

I've heard some pretty natural sounding voices, but yeah they are not free. Spent an hour doing google searches and gave up.

Giometric

I know your thread mentions Windows 7, but if you happen to have a Mac available, Mac OSX 10.7 comes with a bunch of new, very nice TTS voices (in a lot of languages too), and they are all free. Personally the Stephen Hawking one is still my favorite though :P

Anyway, I don't remember the exact procedure for setting it up, but you configure some sort of Universal Access thing where selecting any text and then pressing the command you set up will have your default TTS voice read it out loud to you. Not sure if there are any Windows equivalents to this setup of course but it could give you somewhere to start looking.

From my own experience messing with that, though, I should mention it gets old quick. At least for me (and most people, I suspect), I read so much faster than a voice can speak the text that I wind up getting tired of waiting for it to finish speaking and read the text anyway. Not to mention the fact that no TTS voice will ever get everything right, so you'll have to read the text regardless so you don't miss anything it mispronounced.