“Text to speech made easy”

Apple's text to speech utility, VoiceOver, is very handy to listen to any written text on your Mac, yet it feels a little limited. Take GhostReader, which offers a wide choice of languages and voices and can read any text selection.

Although the original download only comes with American English, it offers more than a dozen different voices and even so, GhostReader will let you download new languages immediately from its web site. It's a shame that you only find voices from the American and European continents, still the choice given is pretty wide.

GhostReader comes in a multi-windowed interface, which put me off a bit, yet I found it very easy to playback text, either in the Reader or simply from a selection. This last point is what I really enjoyed from the program. Select any piece of text anywhere and it will play it.

You will be able to save all your texts in iTunes for later use. GhostReader also work perfectly well with hotkeys.

Although I don't enjoy the multi-windowed interface, I believe GhostReader is a great text to speech utility with many voices and simple playback.

Languages:

English, German, French

Notes:

Doesn't come with voices

Limitations:

15 day Trial Period

OS requirements for GhostReader:

OS: Mac OS X

Minimum requirements:

Processor: PPC/Intel MHz
Mac OS X 10.4 or later

Pros

Many voices
Good playback
Hotkey activation

Cons

Multi-windowed interface
Only American and European voices

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From the publisher of GhostReader

GhostReader allows you to listen while your Mac does the talking in your language of choice. It has the following features:

Listen to Text, Word, HTML, PDF and RTF documents (plus in Leopard: DOCX and ODT documents)
Create personal and educational podcasts by converting text to audio files
Convert text to iTunes tracks with the encoding of your choice: AAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless
Create your own bookmarkable audiobooks by exporting to iTunes tracks
Speak selected text in any application using the GhostReader tool palette or a keyboard shortcut
Simply point your cursor at text in Safari, Pages 2008, TextEdit, or Mail and listen to the paragraph below the cursor instead of reading
Use the included pronunciation editor to modify the way a word is pronounced or to add new abbreviations
Includes high quality voices in a language of choice
Universal Binary (PPC and Intel) requiring Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 or later (fully Leopard compatible)