Free Text-to-Speech App with natural voices

I personally love using Piper to make audiobooks offline. I made a CLI wrapper over it and it works great for me [0] Honestly surprised more people aren&#x27;t using similar offline tools. I have listened to dozens of audiobooks in the past year through this.<p>There is a pitfall in thinking that the most natural voice is the most important metric (i.e. many blind users still prefer espeak). Piper has a great balance of natural voice, offline convenience&#x2F;privacy, and interpretability at high speeds. Still have not seen anything better as an overall audiobook solution.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;C-Loftus&#x2F;QuickPiperAudiobook">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;C-Loftus&#x2F;QuickPiperAudiobook</a>

Eleven Labs is too expensive.<p>They’re missing the chance to be cheap and sweep as many developers as possible into their net. OpenAIs genius is not only being first with a truly great product but being so cheap it’s the easy and obvious choice for developers.<p>Something better will come along.

I have found VoiceGen for Linux Mint to be very good (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linux.softpedia.com&#x2F;get&#x2F;Utilities&#x2F;VoiceGen-104295.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linux.softpedia.com&#x2F;get&#x2F;Utilities&#x2F;VoiceGen-104295.sh...</a>). It is available for download through the software manager.<p>Also, this bookmarklet will speak highlighted text in the browser regardless of platform:<p>javascript:void function(){ javascript:(function(){ var selection = window.getSelection().toString(); if (!selection) { alert(&quot;Please select some text on the page.&quot;); return; } var encodedSelection = document.createElement(&quot;div&quot;); encodedSelection.textContent = selection; var processedContent = encodedSelection.innerHTML.replace(&#x2F;\n&#x2F;g, &quot; &lt;br&gt;&lt;&#x2F;br&gt; &quot;); var words = processedContent.split(&quot; &quot;); var formattedText = &quot;&quot;; var speechContent = &quot;&quot;; for (var i = 0; i &lt; words.length; i++) { var word = words[i]; var chunkSize = Math.floor(word.length &#x2F; 3) + 1; var boldPart = &quot;&lt;span style=&#x27;font-weight:bolder&#x27;&gt;&quot; + word.substring(0, chunkSize) + &quot;&lt;&#x2F;span&gt;&quot;; var lightPart = &quot;&lt;span style=&#x27;font-weight:lighter&#x27;&gt;&quot; + word.substring(chunkSize, word.length) + &quot;&lt;&#x2F;span&gt;&quot;; var formattedWord = boldPart + lightPart; if (word.endsWith(&quot;.&quot;)) { formattedWord += &quot;&lt;span style=&#x27;color:red&#x27;&gt; *&lt;&#x2F;span&gt;&quot;; } formattedText += formattedWord + &quot; &quot;; speechContent += word + &quot; &quot;; } var newWindow = window.open(&quot;&quot;, &quot;_blank&quot;); newWindow.document.write(&quot;&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;title&gt;Spoken Content&lt;&#x2F;title&gt;&lt;&#x2F;head&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;input type=&#x27;range&#x27; min=&#x27;0.1&#x27; max=&#x27;10&#x27; value=&#x27;1&#x27; step=&#x27;0.1&#x27; id=&#x27;rate-slider&#x27;&gt;&lt;p id=&#x27;content&#x27; style=&#x27;background-color:#EDD1B0;font-size:40;line-height:200%25;font-family:Arial&#x27;&gt;&quot;%20+%20formattedText%20+%20&quot;&lt;&#x2F;p&gt;&lt;&#x2F;body&gt;&lt;&#x2F;html&gt;&quot;);%20var%20rateSlider%20=%20newWindow.document.getElementById(&quot;rate-slider&quot;);%20var%20utterance%20=%20new%20SpeechSynthesisUtterance(speechContent);%20rateSlider.addEventListener(&quot;input&quot;,%20function()%20{%20utterance.rate%20=%20rateSlider.value;%20window.speechSynthesis.cancel();%20window.speechSynthesis.speak(utterance);%20});%20window.speechSynthesis.speak(utterance);%20})();}();

I&#x27;ve used this, and the main ElevenLabs service. The reader has to be using a very very cheap model, it sounds worse than the Azure service (which isn&#x27;t bad).<p>It&#x27;s better than traditional text to speech, but I can&#x27;t use it to listen to long form articles.

I haven&#x27;t tested the app but the main service is pretty near natural language. If 11labs app get to the main service quality and start accepting ePubs, it will be the death of Audible.

Account needed to use the app

the quality is somewhere 6&#x2F;10. it still sounds robotics like alexa but its free so it works. i have heard the same audio on youtube videos aswell.