Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to read to you? Like, that article you’ve been meaning to get to? Or student papers? What if you not only had someone to read it to you, but you could take the recording with you to listen to while you work out or on your daily commute?
Check out Read The Words.
Give it any text, either by typing it in, uploading a file, giving it a URL or the address of an RSS feed. The file will be converted to audio. There are several different avatars (voices) you can choose from including a British accent and an Indian accent. You can adjust the reading speed of the avatar to match your listening speed.
For students who are learning English, they can have the written English text in front of them while they listen to the audio for practice with pronunciation. For students who are learning Spanish or French, they can have Spanish or French text read by a Spanish or French speaking avatar.
Once the file has been created, you can download it as an MP3, send it as part of an email, or embed the file in a webpage like I have done here.
The free version of the service allows you to have 3 recordings saved on their server with up to 30 seconds of speaking time per file. For $19.99 a year you get 25 recordings saved on their server of up to an hour of reading time per recording. For $34.99 per year, you get 100 recordings saved and the recording time is upped to 8 hours per file. If you download the file, you can delete it from your library on their server to free up more space for more files.
If you try it out, let me know how it works for you!
