3 Free Text To Speech Tools To Cut Your Proofreading Time In Half
I want to share with you a great new work efficiency discovery I made this week. Being a one-man-band blogger I have to be: researcher, writer, editor and proofreader all in one. I need to wear a lot of hats. One area that until now was taking up an extraordinary amount of time was proofreading. It just wasn’t a very efficient process, as I would get bored, distracted and simply miss things.
After doing research, I found that one of the best ways to proof-read is to read it out loud as you will slow down and concentrate more on the words. I tried this and this didn’t work out for me as I just didn’t enjoy reading out loud continuously.
So after more research, I found out that what many writers were doing now is using a text-to-speech reader to read out the text slowly, making it easier for you to hear any spelling errors, missing punctuation and typos. I found that I could proof-read work and catch most of the errors in one pass whereas I was having to make two or three passes doing it the old way. It cut my proof-reading time in half.
That’s why if you are a blogger, writer, proof-reader, or anyone who has to produce error-free documents, I recommend that you proof-read using a text-to-speech reader. Below, are 4 Great Text To Speech Tools To Cut Your Proofreading Time In Half
1.http://www.text2speech.org/. This is my current favourite as it is free to use and accepts up to 5,000 characters which is around 700 to 1000 words, which means you can proof-read an article all in one go. You simply cut and paste your article into it and click the convert-text-to-speech button and it generates an MP3 speech recording of your article which you can listen to, stop, start and rewind. There is a little background noise but it’s perfectly usable.
2.http://text-to-speech.imtranslator.net/. This is also free and has similar functionality to the one above. The sound quality is better and the voice sounds more human and less robotic, but it does have a 1,000 character limit or around 200 words, so you have to cut and paste a few times to do an article.
3.http://www.naturalreaders.com/. This one requires downloading to your machine. There is a free version which just used microsoft voices or you can start using their premium version, starting at $69.50 with 2 natural sounding voices and a handy microsoft word Add-in so you can use it from within word, making it very convenient.
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