As Giveaway of the Day states:
“TextAlouds unique Text to MP3 or WMA conversion can save your daily reading to audio files to download to your portable player. Listen to email, online news, or important documents while you exercise, work or commute. TextAloud is easy to learn so you can put it to work for you right away.
Everything is user friendly, from the help function to the VCR style playback controls. It has never been easier to keep up with the information you really need. Includes Firefox toolbar. Support for Natural Voices, Neospeech, Cepstral, Acapela BrightSpeech and Elan, and ScanSoft RealSpeak Voices.”
Quick Pros
Full Review...
- Easy-to-use layout – Places everything you need for common use at your fingertips
- A lot of options to alter reading, style, and more
- Does what is supposed to do; Take plain text and convert into audio
- Does accept .doc, .pdf and .html (saved) ad well
- Supports websites via plug-in
There wasn't a simple way to leave comments to the review, so I'll post it here in the hopes that the reviewer will see it. He states:
While free, this application is good for those who are looking for a good text-to-speech application. As for paying $29.95, while the price isn’t very high, it really should include a good voice or offer a ‘package’ that has a bundled voice, say, for $59.95. I would more likely purchase the one with a bundled voice than the standalone one, just because I dislike the quality of the Sam voice, and there isn’t a lot of people on Vista yet to enjoy Anna (And honestly, Anna isn’t a top-notch voice either.)We actually hear this a lot from people, and it is a bit of a mis-understanding and probably partially due to how bad the nextup.com site is to navigate and our not making the message clear. The most popular package we sell is TextAloud with Mike and Crystal voices, and it totals $54.95, so that is $5 cheaper than what he proposes. Our challenges in making this clear are:
- We need to keep a low end package, starting at $29.95 because some of our users either have sight impairments or reading disabilities, and are on fixed incomes. So we need a lot entry point for them, often they will come back a few months later and add voices when they can afford it.
- We offer so many different voice options at
http://nextup.com/TextAloud/SpeechEngine/voices.html
that we are really struggling to find a way to present all the options without overwhelming people. We do have a site redesign pending, which will hopefully help.
2 comments:
Hello Ken White!
This is the author of the review. Thank you for finding my review. I am always glad to see people who have the chance to read my reviews actually read them. I did stomp around your site a little bit and I couldn't find a package that included voices easily, and that is why I mentioned it to you. :)
$54.95 is still fairly high price point - Maybe your shopping cart application can allow people to assemble which voices they want and offer 'bundle' discounts for 1, 2 and more than 2 voices for example. Microsoft's default voices are atrocious by far; At least with Vista there has been improvements seen but still nothing like the high-quality voices available now (And unfortunately Anna doesn't even compare to voices from some of these other companies which were out years ago.)
(And about not being able to leave comments; Unfortunately the bloggins/CMS system I chose for its sheer power, lacks any integrated comment system. That's why I have my forums on my site; Awkward at best. I will have a comment form up eventually.)
Thanks for the note. As I'm sure you've found looking at our site, it is a complete mess. We are just incredibly slow getting it updated, have been working on a redesign for months. We also very much struggle with the fact that we have so many options to offer, but don't want to overwhelm people with too many choices at once. Hopefully we'll get it figured out.
I really like what you are doing with your blog.
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