Make Your Own Audio Books

Do you travel often? Taking a long-haul flight can be made easier and far less boring if you have a good reading with you. In a long-haul drive, however, you normally don't spend too much attention to a printed or electronic book without crashing into someone. The solution? Audio books.

Audio books are great when you need to kill some time. Their entertainment and educational value is hard to underestimate. Pick a fiction book, and you're likely to enjoy the long flight, drive or walk. Choose a language course, and you'll get a chance to learn the language while doing regular driving. In this article you will learn how to save money by producing your own fiction and education audio books in just minutes instead of buying them for $20-40 apiece.

Text-to-speech is the only computer technology that can produce voice from ordinary texts. The technology is far from being new, but we're still not there in terms of voice quality. Unnatural, synthetic voices, spelling and punctuation problems, software limitations and the lack of adequate psychological models of human speech plague many old and current text-to-speech and text-to-voice algorithms, making audio books produced with, say, Microsoft TTS engine that comes bundled with Windows sound unnatural at best.

Luckily, there are computer programs designed to make computer-generated reading easy on the ear. Pistonsoft Text to Speech Converter can take texts and documents of any size and create high-quality audio books of any length. Its newly designed text-to-speech engine makes long readings sound natural and easy on the ear. The developers of this handy audio book creation tool tweaked the usual psychological model of modern text-to-speech engines, enhancing it with Smart Pause.

Smart Pause is exactly what makes the audio books produced by Pistonsoft Text to Speech Converter easy on the ear. As computers don't breathe, they tend to produce narrations that sound uncomfortable to the human ear. The computer-generated narrations, while pausing at dots and commas, completely lack pauses that a human reader would need to catch their breath. As a result, the text becomes too monotonous, and very soon the listener gets the uncomfortable feeling of suffocation.

Smart Pause makes Pistonsoft Text to Speech Converter 'breathe'. The text-to-speech engine used in the audio book converter automatically detects moments when a human reader would need to breathe in, and makes appropriate pauses in the reading. As a result, the long-playing audio books sound more natural and easier on the ear than those produced with comparable text-to-speech engines.

Pistonsoft Text to Speech Converter lets you select any SAPI 5 voices installed on your computer or download an extra one from the Cepstral Web site. You control the speed and volume of your audio book to produce readings most comfortable to your taste.