AshSofDev Speak

AshSofDev Speak is a piece of software that has features for reading text aloud using robotic voices as well as for recognizing speech via microphone to automatically write the text. This type of software can help you prepare for presentations at school or at work.

The downloaded package is pretty large but the tool gets installed fast. The only notable aspect is that .NET Framework must be installed on your computer.

Luckily, newer Windows versions come bundled with this software framework, so you just have to make sure that it's enabled.

The main menu has two large buttons responsible for activating the speech recognition and text-to-speech features.

If you have a microphone integrated into the PC or plugged in, you can start the speech recognition module, stop it anytime, view the transcript in the window, as well as copy the text to the clipboard or save it as a plain text document by indicating the output directory and file name.

When it comes to the text-to-speech component, you can choose between a male and female voice (Microsoft David and Microsoft Zira - US), adjust the rate of speech by moving a slider, paste text from the clipboard, or open a text document from the computer. The reading can be stopped anytime with one click.

Although AshSofDev Speak hasn't received updates for a long time, we haven't experienced compatibility issues with the newest Windows version in our tests. It worked smoothly. On the other hand, the interface is unpolished and doesn't have any customization settings.

Nevertheless, AshSofDev Speak delivers a simple and straightforward solution for helping you use speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools. It's free and easy to use.