Concrete Voice

Concrete Voice is a small software application whose purpose is to help you make use of text-to-speech capabilities in order to read aloud a user-defined text message. This open-source program employs Microsoft text-to-speech engine. It is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8.

There are several advantages brought by portable utilities like Concrete Voice to your computer. You can open its GUI by simply running the EXE file. No installation process is needed. Plus, you can run it without having to possess administrative privileges directly from the storage device.

You can drop it on USB flash drives or other removable devices so you can carry it with you all the time. It does not populate your Windows registry and leave other configuration settings behind so you can uninstall it with a simple deletion task of the package of files that you have downloaded from the Internet.

Concrete Voice reveals a clean design that has only a few configuration settings to offer. A help manual is not comprised in the package so you need to experiment a little bit with the dedicated parameters in order to understand how the program works.

The application offers you the possibility to manually input the text that you want to read aloud or paste the information from the clipboard. You can also edit the input text in case you want to make some changes to it.

Other important options worth being mentioned enable you to alter the encoding of the text by choosing between several preset modes from a drop-down list, convert data to lowercase or uppercase letters, as well as check out the current date and time (in hours, minutes, and seconds) displayed in the main window.

On the downside, the tool has not been updated for a long time so you may bump into all sorts of errors and compatibility issues on newer operating systems. It does not offer support for advanced options so you cannot adjust the speech rate and alter the volume, just to name a few suggestions.

To sum things up, Concrete Voice comes packed with several basic features for helping you convert user-defined text messages to speech. It is suitable especially for less experienced users.