2nd Speech Center Editor's Review

2nd Speech Center converts any text written in English into spoken words. The output can either be played back, or it can be saved into a music file.

The supported file output formats are WAV and MP3. The program can use various voices for text playback .Ten different voices can be selected from a drop-down menu. However, you can customize the speed and pitch of any voice, the output being different each time.

The program's user interface is nicely designed. The buttons on the toolbar have nice graphics, allowing you to easily get used to the program. You can open more than one text document at a time, because each document is opened in a different tab.

The program has support for reading text directly from the clipboard. Even more, this application can continuously monitor your clipboard and display a dialog whenever you copy new text. This dialog asks you whether you want to read the newly added text or you want to continue your work. The text from the clipboard can also be read by choosing the "Read text from clipboard" mode.

Another nice feature of this software allows you to define so called "control tags". These "control tags" are in fact the intervals for short and long pauses. Pauses are required especially during sentences, in order to make the output audio more human-like.

Pluses: Reading text from the cursor position is supported. Even though in the evaluation version reading only selected text is not available, once you buy the program this limitation is removed. The program also has a built-in talking alarm clock. You can listen to web pages, emails, PDF files or Word documents

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: 2nd Speech Center is a very good application for converting text to speech. It's user-friendly and easy to use, so you shouldn't have too much trouble getting it to read text for you.

version reviewed: 3.30.7.1129