Is there an high quality natural text reader for the mac?

Posted by Another Registered User on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Another Registered User
Published on 2010-06-15T12:39:40Z Indexed on 2010/06/15 12:43 UTC
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I'm reading about 150 pages of text on screen, every day. I will have to read about 15.000 in the next upcoming months. No joke.

Well, the problem is this: I suffer from a sort of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder which forces me to read every sentence up to 10 times until I really get it. Mac OS X Snow Leopard has a built-in text reader with the name "Alex".

Although it is already pretty good quality, I know there are far better natural sounding voices out there. I have heard already voices that are absolutely amazing compared to Alex. They're so good, that you can't tell anymore the difference between a real person or a computer. Alex still has this "metal factor" in its voice, which makes my ears hurt after 8 hours of listening.

The next problem with Alex is, that he never makes a break after a sentence. Also, it's not possible to think about a sentence and then continue reading. It's also not possible to have him repeat a sentence, without tedious text selection and shortcut usage.

Actually, the best tool I can imagine would have the option to read a sentence and move on to the next one after pressing a special key, OR repeating the previously one after pressing a special key. That would help so much! And if that's even with one of those bell lab / AT&T / whatever super-natural voices, even better!

But it would be already a great relief if there was just a better tool to control Alex. To let him make breaks after sentences or let him speak big chunks of text sentence-by-sentence with fine-grained control over repetition and moving on.

Is there anything?

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