Need a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program for the audio book you’re making?  Then get Balabolka.

What is the big deal about Balabolka?

This freeware has features that are as amazing as it name sounds. It uses various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI); it allows you to alter a voice’s parameters, including rate and pitch. The user can apply a special substitution list to improve the quality of the voice’s articulation. This feature is useful when you want to change the spelling of words.

You can save the on-screen text in any of these formats: WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG or WMA files. Balabolka can read the clipboard content, view the text from DOC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, ODT, PDF and RTF files, customize font and background colour, control reading from the system tray or by the global hotkeys. The program uses VBScript syntax for spelling and error correction, so it’s compatible with most spell-checkers.

Balabolka can save the synchronized text in external LRC files or in MP3 tags inside the audio files. When an audio file is played with players on a computer or on modern digital audio players, the text is displayed synchronously (at the same way, as lyrics for songs).

Ilya Morozov, the publisher of this program, has made some changes to this version. The changes are: Added the option “Never prompt to save modified text” (the window “Settings”, the tab “Text”) and resources for Bulgarian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Turkish and Ukrainian languages were updated.

Downsides?

Balabolka requires a large amount of CPU and system memory. This is the best Text-to Speech software ever. What’s more, it’s free!

To familiarize yourself with this program, please visit Balabolka.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 6th, 2013 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.