CoolSpeech is a proprietary
text-to-speech
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conv ...
program for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
platform, developed by ByteCool Software Inc, founded in February 2001. CoolSpeech controls text-to-speech engines compliant with
Microsoft Speech API to fetch and read aloud text from a variety of sources, including
website
A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...
s,
email accounts, local
text documents (
.txt,
.rtf,
.htm/html), the Windows
Clipboard,
keyboard input from anywhere in Windows, and the current date and time. It can also bookmark a text source to be read aloud periodically or on-demand.
Features
* Listen to online news from any
URL
A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...
specified by the user.
* Read local text files, rich-text files and HTML files aloud.
* Convert a given piece of text into a spoken
wave file
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...
(.wav).
* Listen to new messages from
POP3
In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Today, POP version 3 (POP3) is the most commonly used version. Together with IMAP, i ...
email accounts specified by the user.
* Listen to every word or sentence the user has just typed anywhere in Windows.
* Listen to text copied to the Windows Clipboard immediately.
* Schedule files, URLs and emails to be read aloud.
* Tell the current time and the date in different styles.
* Support all
Microsoft Speech API 4.0-compliant voices.
Awards
*
ZDNet "Hot File of the Day" on January 6, 2004.
*
MSN "Featured Download" on February 19, 2005.
*
SmartComputing magazine's "November 2007 Smart Choice Award".
Sister product
CoolSpeech has a sister product TextSound,
which specializes in enhanced capabilities to batch convert text files into audio files, for users who need to produce spoken audio files in large volumes.
See also
*
Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...
*
Microsoft Speech API
References
External links
*
{{Speech synthesis
Windows-only shareware
Speech synthesis software
2001 software