Guides: Talking books and Speech synthesizers: Speech synthesizers

Speech synthesizers

TorTalk is a speech synthesizer for Windows and Mac OS that can read most texts. It includes voices in 20 languages.

Screenshot of TorTalk showing 7 buttons: Play, Pause, Decrease and increase speed, Optical Character Reader, Change language and Settings

TorTalk is installed on all computers on campus. As a student you can also get the program for your personal computer.

TorTalk consists of two functions for reading:

Read selected text on websites, documents and more
OCR-function (Optical Character Recognition) that can read text that you can't select such as scanned documents or images with text.

Get access to TorTalk via IT Helpdesk

The built in speech synthesis in iPhone/iPad

In iPhones and iPads, you can listen to written text with the built in speech synthesizer. In the web reader, iBooks and some other apps you can mark the text to listen to it.

vBookz PDF Voice Reader (free, but voices cost money)

vBookz PDF Voice Reader is an app that can read out PDF files. You can test read the first page in a document with different voices, but to continue you need to purchase accessibility.