Whats a good life sounding text to voice software or service?

Whats a good life sounding text to voice software or service?

Hello all. You've probably all watched those videos that have had text converted to voice and it sounds really robotic! Or even those podcasts or audio MP3's etc where someone has used some text to voice converting software and it sounds like someone is speaking to you in Dalek like Exterminate! Exterminate! The. Doctor. is. Here. Exterminate! Exterminate! LOL

Well apparently, they've actually come quite a long way now and they've improved a lot. So much so that you can no longer tell the difference between a CGV (Computer Generated Voice) and an RPV (Real Persons Voice). Or did you think that Siri, Cortana and Alexa were actual people sitting in a room like Raj thought when he dated his phone in the Big Bang Theory!?

What's the matter Raj, cat got your tongue? lol

And I was looking into this myself a little while back and did bookmark a couple of sites. Longer back than before that, I did use a couple of cool sites I found that would let you convert a big article of around 1000 words into a voice MP3 file you can download. And it never used to sound that bad either. Not perfect, but not horrible to listen to as well if you know what I mean!

And there was some sites that offered lots of different voices, male, female, accent etc. So you could have an American guy talking for you or you could have an Indian woman if you wanted too and they sounded quite good but usually they wanted paying for access or one time use depending on the size and amount of words and text to be converted.

And it's something I'm going to look into a bit more now. But I was just wondering and thought to ask here just in case anyone else has had any experience with doing this and converting some text to speech using some software, tool or online resource?

And I'm not talking about hiring someone to be my voice over. Although, that is definitely one option and would generally be better too since you can have them put emphasis on certain words or sentences or have the article read out in ether a slow melodramatic style or a fast, upbeat style and real people can express emotions in the tone of their voice you know? But voice overs could work out quite costly if you do many, many of them over a long time.

Well do you know of any actual text to speech software (free or paid) that you can do that with too? Something that lets you highlight certain parts of text that should be said in a certain way. That would be uber awesome but anything that just lets you convert text to speech and the voice doesn't sound like you're listening to a Dalek from Dr Who would be great!



But yeah, anything you know of like that? Something free preferably?

What I'm actually hoping for is that there has been some competition in this field online. Much like there was with stock photo sites, image editing sites, infographic creation sites like Canva etc that are competing against each other and that like other technologies this one (when it comes to text to speech software) will have improved greatly so much so that you can find amazing, human sounding, text to speech software that you can just use for free!

Let me know if you know something like that as I want to do this on a fairly large scale!

Thanks!

Mike.