Zabaware Free Text to Speech Software

Zabaware make a great little text to speech program. Their free version does not come with high quality text to speech voices but if you have Windows 8 or Windows 10 on your computer you have pretty good quality Microsoft Voices David and Zira that work well with this free program to read back any text you want to copy into this program.You can adjust the reading speed and can pause or stop the program from reading. The program can also be minimized to the system tray on the bottom right of your computer screen. Don't bother using the other voices that come with the free version of the program they are not good quality.

The program has an option that it is turned on in the "Options" menu that will allow the program to speak any text you select and choose "Copy" by right clicking on the selected text, the program will read the selected text too you. If you don't want this feature it is easy to turn off in the "Options" menu.

This program is very light weight, no super fancy colorful menus but lots of great features. You can change the colors, fonts, and size of text and background color in the program very easily. I have to say for a free program it works very well and of course you will see on their website they have a paid version for $24 that includes high quality human sounding voices, etc.I have not tried their paid version.

I know many free programs come with viruses but I am running Norton Antivirus on my computer and this program was declared "Safe" by Norton, so don't worry about viruses etc. If you don't have antivirus software running on your computer I recommend turning on the free antivirus that comes with Windows called Windows Defender. Just type Windows Defender in the search box in windows to find it and turn it on.

Text to speech software comes in handy for reading text from websites and emails. Give your eyes a rest and give it a try. You can even save the text you copy into the program as an audio file (Wave File), by clicking the "File" menu and choosing "Convert text into a Wav Audio File". Very simple! Later you can listen to the text being read aloud by double clicking on the audio file or you can copy the audio file to your phone or other device that plays audio files to listen to it later. You could also copy the file to a CD or DVD.

Another cool feature of the program, they really have thought of everything, as the program reads the text aloud it also flashes each word in large print at the bottom of the page so if you want to, you do not need to read the text across the page as it reads, you can just watch each spoken work flash at the bottom of the page. There are other speed reading programs and apps (Spritz and Speedreader) that do this but it was a nice touch for them to include this feature in their program. This also helps people with dyslexia or vision problems to read faster.

Here is a link to their website if you want to download Zabaware Free Text to Speech Software. Remember as I have said before this is my honest opinion, I don't have any financial affiliation with any of the suppliers of products I list or recommend.

http://www.zabaware.com/download.asp