Tag Archives: text to speech

L’il Mouth

We have recently come across a great piece of software aimed at helping anyone who has difficulty reading text on a computer screen by reading the text aloud.  L’il Mouth is a  text to speech application that can be downloaded and installed for free.  L’il Mouth will read out any text that you can ‘copy’, whether it is on a Word document, PDF file or website.

The great thing about L’il Mouth is that it is very simple to use – all you need to do is highlight and copy the text you want it to read out then click on the mouth icon on your screen.  L’il Mouth will work with whatever voice is set as default in the ’speech’ options and can be used with the Scottish Voices mentioned in the recent post ‘Text to Speech’.

Click  here to find out more about L’il Mouth and how to download it.

Text to Speech

Did you know that with the right software your computer can turn text into the spoken voice? 

Children who find reading difficult can often benefit from having text reinforced by hearing it read aloud. 

 If you have Microsoft Word installed on your computer you can download WordTalk which is a free text-to-speech plugin.  It will speak the text of the document and will highlight it as it goes. It also contains a talking dictionary to help decide which  spelling is most appropriate.  Word Talk can be used to save Word documents as sound files and transferred to phones or mp3 players allowing the user to hear a document read out.  For more information on WordTalk and how to download it click here.

Read Out Loud is a feature that comes with the free Adobe Reader (Version 6.0 or later) which reads aloud the text in a PDF document.  To read out a document simply select View / Read Out Loud / Read to End of Document.  For more information on the feature  click here.

The quality of synthetic voices varies considerable and we would highly recommend that before using any text to speech software you download one of the Scottish voices that have been created by CereProc in Edinburgh.   The Scottish Government has funded CALL Scotland to provide a Scotland-wide schools licence for 2 Scottish voices ‘Heather andStuart which can also be downloaded by pupils for home use.  Click here for a link to download both voices.