eSpeak

Instead of reading a piece of text, you can use the eSpeak application to have that text spoken to you. This is a free text-to-speech tool that will read out loud the text that you type/paste into its interface or the text from a file that you open with a simple mouse click.

eSpeak is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Getting it up and running on your Windows PC requires downloading an archive, extracting its contents, and running the setup executable inside. When you do this, a simple setup wizard will be presented; click through it to install eSpeak on your machine.

The main part on eSpeak’s interface is taken up by a text box. Type in or paste a piece of text in there and the application will speak it out loud. Underneath there’s a dropdown menu for choosing the voice, a rate and volume slider, and another dropdown for picking the audio format. To the right there are buttons for loading a text file, starting the speech process, and more.

Using eSpeak is a very simple process. There are three options at your disposal: you can type in something, you can paste a piece of text, or you can open a text file. No matter which option you go for, the text you want to be read out loud will be displayed front and center on the application’s interface. Hit the Speak button and eSpeak will begin to read the text. As it does this, it will highlight the word it’s reading – and it will play a rather cute animation.

eSpeak is free and open source.

With eSpeak on your side, you can listen to text instead of reading it on your own. This free and open source text will read text out loud to you.