Text Aloud and Voice Narration Recommendations Requested?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Loren R. Elks reports: <<We have tried Text Aloud to develop narration 
for our eLearning and Blended Learning projects.  If you are not 
familiar with Text Aloud, it is located at:  http://www.nextup.com/ .  
This program enables you to enter text and have a voice give you 
narration for it. However, we are finding that we need a program that 
will allow us to better fine tune inflections and the pronunciation of 
words.  We have a budget of around $1K for this new software, if 
necessary.>>

Just a thought: Have you considered actually hiring "voice talent" and 
using a human instead of software? I understand that this is not always 
an option, particularly where your revision cycle is chaotic and the 
text isn't finalized until the software ships, but it's still the best 
solution if you want realistic narration.

Of course, humans are more expensive and someone (probably you) must 
take responsibility for ensuring that there are no "voicepos" (verbal 
typos <g>), skipped text, or mispronounced words, but there are 
shortcuts that can make the process less expensive.

For example, your local university undoubtedly has a drama department, 
and most big cities have radio or TV broadcasting schools. Students 
work cheap compared with unionized professionals, but can nonetheless 
do a very good job, particularly if you teach them certain key 
pronunciations--plus, you're doing them a huge favor by giving them 
experience they can list on their resume and better income than they'd 
get flipping burgers.

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Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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