AAQR: IVONA high quality text to speech

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Tired of the robotic Pico Text-to-Speech engine built into Android and don't want to pay for SVOX? Now there's a new choice... IVONA Text to Speech HQ voices.

Download this new TTS engine, enable it in settings, and set it as default. It sounds MUCH MUCH better than the built-in one. And being the default TTS it is universal.

Indeed, if you download some proper apps, it will even read aloud ebooks for you (I use a pretty obscure one called CoolReader, which *does* support TTS, unlike Kindle / Nook apps. And you can also download additional voices. The American one sounds pretty good, and you can download a couple variants, such as Australian English, Welsh English, as well as a couple other European languages.

The American voice is VERY natural. If I didn't pay much attention I could have sworn it was just read very "robotic" by a real person. It's the "timing" that's off, but not off by much. And occasionally it pronounced the wrong word. For example, "Dr." is pronounced as "drive" (huh?!) when I made it read Sherlock Holmes.

Remember, download the main app, then download the voice installer, then run the voice installer to actually download the voice. Then SET the IVONA as your default TTS engine, then start using it.

Try it, you will like it very much. Really.

http://www.appbrain.com/app/ivona-text-to-speech-hq/com.ivona.tts

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