NaturalReaders - Best Text-to-Speech Converter

On so many occasions I have tried to a really good Text to Speech Converter, but there is nothing that I quite liked.

Until today.

I found the best Text to Speech converter - NaturalReaders.

 Update: I have discovered a better on. check below 

Shukrant, A friend of mine, a fellow SEO and Blogger, he just shared a story in a Facebook Group that he sometimes can't read really long text, but he uses this to upload the text and listen to content in a human voice generated by AI.

He also suggested a nice voice of an old British person - English UK - Peter. Which is really nice.

NaturalReaders - Best Text-to-Speech Converter

NaturalReaders is intelligent AI generated Text-to-Speech converter. Which mainly aimed for people to listen to the blog articles or any piece of texts, but you can utilize it so many ways that we will discuss later.

It supports many text formats like PDF, txt, doc, ppt and even webpages. You basically provide it with the text in any format mentioned, it reads that out for you. It offers so many male and female voices and accents of different countries. You can also adjust the speed.

NaturalReaders offers - 

Online: You can upload the text document and NaturalReaders reads it online.

Software: You download the desktop app, it does basically the same thing. I have not used the desktop app yet, so say more about it now. I have downloaded it and mostly gonna try it after I complete writing this post.

WebReader: Have you seen on some blogs or websites they have a Reader which reads out the articles for you? In case, you haven't seen one check this out. You can add one on your blog for free. Nice!

It has a commercial version, which gives you permission to distribute the voice generated by it. Basically, you can download the voice in MP3 format, which you can distribute in the form of podcasts, video narration - name to few. Commercial version also unlocks a few more AI-generated voices, I am hoping they are even better.

For educational institutions, they offer it for free, which, I am hoping, has also the features of the commercial version.

Text to Voice Converter - How to utilize: 

For free you are only allowed NaturalReaders for personal use, so for many of the uses I mention below, you have to purchase the licence.

Listen to the long articles you can't read

If you are a lazy reader you like to listening over reading, you can upload the text and listen to the amazing human-like voices.

WebReader Widget - Allow your audience to listen to your blog articles

You can use this widget on your blog. It will convert the Text into Speeches and your audience can play and listen to that once they are on the webpage.

Create narrations for YouTube videos

If you are a nervous person or not confident about your English, you can use this tool for creating narrations of your YouTube videos.

Speed up your content marketing game by converting your Blog posts into Podcast

You can convert your blog posts into Audios and Videos and distribute those. Now you have more and diverse content with just very little bit of effort.

Backlinks:

By creating audio and video files you can distribute in Audio and Video sharing sites. For audio files, you can distribute those in podcast sharing sites like - SoundCloud, Podbean, Spreaker, Buzzsprout and so on; videos you can distribute in YouTube, Vimeo, etc. You will get profile links and even links from each post in some cases.

Well, many SEO's do not consider profile links to be powerful. But in my opinion yes they are not that much powerful but is quite necessary. They are foundation links, any genuine business will have profile links from many relevant sites, which is a sign that that website is serious. They even can diversify link and in low competitive niches, they can be enough to get you on the sweet spot on Google.

Anyway, watch this video to learn how you can make strong profile links that can get you ranked.

Bit old video still works.

How to get the MP3 file for Free?

Well, for free you don't get to download MP3 or the audio file. But that doesn't mean you can't get it. In this section, I will describe one idea, that I came to my mind within a few seconds, to extract the audio.

Note that - you are not legally allowed to extract and use this audio for commercial purpose. I am showing this for educational purposes.

The basic idea is to record the voice when it reads, then edit the recording. No matter which software you are using you needs record computer audio, not the audio from outside. So, you need to stop recording from the mic.

I immediately tried turning on Audacity to record the sound, but it was not good enough. I have chosen the following setting to achieve that, 

...but the result was not satisfactory.

So, finally what worked is - OBS Studio. The process is a bit complicated but is fine for me.

Turn OBS on, maybe have no Video Source if you want to record the Audio only. Off the Mic/Aux audio source (imp) then start recording.

Well, it will be a video format, then you have extracted the audio from it and save it as MP3. I am using Filmora 9 for extracting Audio, you can use anyone. There are even online options as well. But this is working for me.

IBM Watson Text to Speech (TTS) - an Even Better Text to Speech Converter

I found IBM Watson to even better than Natural Readers.

Try it out here: https://text-to-speech-demo.ng.bluemix.net/

Previously, speech synthesis was based on copying short speech segments from a recorded voice data set and then concatenating them together.

Today, our speech synthesis is based on the latest voice technologies in three (3) deep neural networks (DNNs), which learn various aspects of speech during the training process.
At the time of speech synthesis, the DNNs predict the pitch and phoneme durations (prosody), spectral structure, and waveform of the speech, making the voice output crisper, clearer and much more natural-sounding

Source: Watson TTS blog

Download audio: I have not tried downloading audio, but it seems you have to create an account on IBM cloud and from there you can get it. If that doesn't work, you can always Audacity, or OBS to capture the audio.

Final words:

I have got this idea in seconds after discovering the tool, and it just worked, but I haven't spent much time on it. So, there might a much better way to do this. So, if you come across one, let me know.

Did you like it? How are you planning to use it?

Let me know.

Stay safe, be inside and wash your hands.