While surfing the net I discovered that Google has a service that reads out text, converting it to speech so I tried it out and it works great, the voice doesn’t sound robotic at all like some of the other converters that are available today. The best part is that you can use it by passing it a sentence as part of a URL and it will return a mp3 file with the voice over.
For example, visiting the following link will cause it to read out “Hello and welcome”: http://www.google.com/translate_tts?q=Hello+and+welcome
Try it out. To have it read out a different text just change the text after ‘q=’ with your own text, replacing the spaces in the sentence with a + sign.
The only other Text To Speech service I have seen that does this good work is the AT&T Labs Natural Voices site.
The advantage of the Google service is that it can be automated and can be used within scripts and other programs to generate natural sounding voice responses.
Source: blogoscoped.com
– Suramya