Last updated on 14 February 2025
Natural Readers is a service that has been offering its services for some time now. Text-to-speech services for professionals. It is recognized for the quality of its speech synthesis software. The tool also offers a completely free version that is perfectly usable in an educational setting.
Natural reader comes in the form of speech synthesis software for your Mac or PC computer. It can also be used entirely online or via an extension for the Chrome browser.
Voice synthesis that gives voice to your texts
The free online version of Natural Readers is very easy to use. No need to register for basic use. Just go to the homepage of the site and in the box provided for this purpose paste the text you want to vocalize. Choose the voice you want to use. In the free version, you will not have much choice. One French voice, Thomas, and another for our Canadian friends, Amélie.
All you have to do is press the big play button above the text and immediately the text is read aloud by a high-quality synthetic voice. You can still set the diction speed to approach the most natural tone possible.
Unable to download the result in mp3 format. For this it would be necessary to switch to the paid version.
Voice synthesis for use in education
Natural Readers can find different areas of experimentation in the educational field, especially for DYS students or students with severe reading difficulties.
Natural Readers' speech synthesis software can thus facilitate reading and comprehension. When the text is read aloud by the software, the tool highlights in colour the sentences read by the speech synthesis. Practical.
Another interesting option built into the free version. Rather than copy and paste the text you want to translate, you can upload files containing text directly. Natural readers go to extract text automatically to submit it to its on-board speech synthesis software. Natural Readers accepts files in PDF, TXT, DOC(x), EPUB, ODS, ODT, Pages, PPT(x) format as well as PNG and JPEG image formats.
You can then if you want to read aloud the whole text or only a sentence that you will emphasize and this as many times as you want.
The Chrome extension, once installed, will allow you to read out loud any excerpt of text found on a page of a site.
The interface of Natural Readers is very clean. No advertising on the horizon other than incentives to switch to the premium version which offers, among other things, additional synthetic voices and the possibility to download a text in MP3 format read aloud.
To be tested.
Link: Natural Readers
You will probably also be interested in TTSMaker which allows free have a text read by a synthetic voice and register it.
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