PDF to Audio

Super99

I'm looking for some good software that will convert a PDF book into MP3 so one can listen to it on an Ipod or whatever.
There are a few out there but the demo sounds terrible.
Anyone know of anything good?

TheShadow

Super99 wrote: »

I'm looking for some good software that will convert a PDF book into MP3 so one can listen to it on an Ipod or whatever.
There are a few out there but the demo sounds terrible.
Anyone know of anything good?

I think that you might be expecting too much. The primary component in what you want to do is the text to speech engine. One is already built into windows ( I believe Mac also) so all that is needed is a capture audio to MP3 which any old program will do.

I don't know about Acrobat reader but Acrobat professional has the "read out loud" function on the view menu. So it is a simple matter of capturing the sound card output. You can adjust the speaking speed on the control panel text to speech icon. Mine is set to Anna and slower than normal speed. I believe more voices are down-loadable.

The problem really is better inflections and for that you need a better speech engine than the one that comes with windows. I would imagine that is costly. Something like what the phone company or banks use. That requires more complex "look ahead/look behind" algorithms and a bigger hit on your hardware.

Other than that "I got nuthin"

DevilWAH

agree windows VISTA and above and acrobat reader can already do text to speech, but the voice is a bit robot like.

IF you want some thing better then prepare to pay money. This is still a new technology to get clear human sounding speech from text. It requires very clever programming, to give the computer a clear understanding of human speech pattens. Not the kind of thing your average bed room programmer is going to be churning out as a free application.

Things like Dragon natural speaking (which is actual really meant for speech to text, but also have a reading mode) does a better job, but it cost a bit.

I am dyslexic and a few years ago I looked in to this, to be honest the robot voices are the best, and even the built in windows/acrobat versions are as good as most of what is out on the internet.

have you tried http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm,

http://www.nuance.co.uk/speak-and-see-suite/ (these are the leading company when it comes to this kind of stuff, there speech to text software is market leading and has been for years)

http://www.nextup.com/index.html

this is about as good as it gets.