SpeechMyText

Text-to-speech engines have gotten quite advanced, and several TTS voices are included in Windows to be used for various purposes. They allow you to listen to text being read, and they can also be used by third-party software.

SpeechMyText is a relatively simple application that enables you to convert text to speech, listen to the rendition and even save it locally as a WAV file. It is a rudimentary tool, however, and it needs some improvements.

This program does exactly what you would expect – it takes any typed text and converts it to audio using any of the TTS voices available on your system. You can either type everything manually or insert it directly from a text file.

However, once the application has started reading the text, it becomes completely unresponsive, which means you cannot pause it or even shut it down until it finishes. This is far from ideal, and this issue needs to be addressed in a future release.

SpeechMyText can be used to create audiobooks, as it enables you to save the converted text to a WAV file. The operation is completed fairly quickly even when dealing with larger documents.

The application only allows you to import TXT and RTF files however, so e-books first need to be converted to the right format before being processed.

When it comes to the user interface, we can’t say that we were impressed by the program’s visual design, but its layout is fairly intuitive.

An audio message is played whenever the application is launched, which seems unnecessary, so it would be great if users had the option of disabling it.

Overall, SpeechMyText is a simplistic piece of software that can be useful for converting short text passages to speech and saving the results as audio files. The user interface is outdated, however, and there are a few issues that need to be dealt with.