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Specs

Features

Ease
of Use

Sample Screen

Sample Audio

Road
Test

Title: Text Aloud MP3
Company: NextUp.com
Price: $19.95
Type of Computer: PC
Requirements: Windows 95/98/NT/2000 on minimum P100, 16 MB RAM, 5 MB Disk Space, and a sound card
Availability for Trial Run: 2 weeks

Features
• Can read units of text such as characters, words, lines and paragraphs
• User may listen immediately or save to .wav or MP3 files to hear later.
• Reads selected portions of the screen automatically or through commands from the keyboard
• Controls the rate, pitch and volume of speech output
• Comes in two different modes: Single-reads one article at a time and Multi-user may store many different text files and specify different voices for each.
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Ease of Use

Clear, complete user documentation	Online Tutorial available; Help available on menu bar, including audio help; also the website provides a FAQ page. Free technical support via e-mail.
Easy to set up program	Very easily done. May download/ try out and then purchase from the website.
Easy to exit from program	File -->Exit TextAloud; also easy to stop the reading of an article: click on STOP on the toolbar
Audio is effective	Sounds rather mechanical but for the cost, it does the job quite well.
Choice of voices	Download program came with Mary's voice but there is the opportunity to download other voices, Mike and Sam. Mary clearly has the most pleasant, natural sounding human voice.

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SampleScreen:

Sample Audio: Click here Back to Top

Road Test: This program was very easy to set up and use. The process for listening to an article or any text was the following:
(1) Open up TextAloud to activate it and then minimize. A popup window will appear on the desktop.
(2) Highlight the text to be read.
(3) Press Control-C to copy to the Clipboard.
(4) Click the New button and the software will automatically read the selected text. Back to Top