Can’t you find your favourite (or any other) graphic novel and comic book on audio content platforms? Don’t worry! We bring you one of the best text readers you can employ on comics.
With the convergence produced by the digitisation of cultural assets, the radio market has expanded and diversified, thus generating different radio content that seeks to satisfy the needs that audiences have for entertainment and information: e.g. audiobooks and podcasts. But who said that extension of orality couldn’t reach the cultural consumption of comics?
We get that things would be upside-down. On the one hand, the image and the visual, so ingrained in comics, are no longer part of the experience. On the other hand, the sound produced by the mind of each individual begins to be external to him. Yet, that’s the magic of the Internet. It is the place where content can free itself from the limitations of the analogue model.
Text to speech (or TTS) technology can be a helpful ally for achieving this new consumption. It is capable of reading text-based materials and giving them a voice. As a result, people are able to listen to content no matter if they lie in bed, walk or run, or find themselves carrying out another activity.
Hence, TTS assets can permit us to hear comic-book vignettes. The big question now is: what text to speech tool can actually bring its characters to life? The force is strong with the following text reader:
Woord
Due to artificial intelligence, Woord‘s speech synthesis generates excellent sounds that resemble human speech. Consequently, you can obtain realistic voices across 28 different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Dutch, Norwegian, Korean, Polish, Swedish, etc.), including regional variations like Mexican Spanish, Brazillian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Canadian French. Plus, you can enjoy these 50 diverse natural voices through male, female and gender-neutral speakers.
And that’s only the beginning. With Woord, you can further customise your comic’s mouthpieces. You are probably thinking about speeding up or slowing down the audio. The software does allow you to control the pace, but there’s more you can do to personalise your spokespeople. For instance, you can decide on the device profile (IVR, GPS and Smarthome, for example) or audio effect that better suits your needs. Not to mention the platform comes with an SSML editor. This exquisite tool lets you emphasise or whisper parts of the speech, add breaks and breaths and even arrange phonemes. To sum up, the sky’s the limit when talking about Woord‘s customisation.
What’s more, Woord encompasses other state of the art features regarding TTS technology: OCR scanner, MP3 download, a Chrome extension and API access. Therefore, it is a full-packed AI voice generator. If you want to test it before any purchase, you can try the software for free by creating an account. The signup will give you 20,000 characters and two audios to convert your comics (as simple text or pdf, txt, doc(x), pages, odt, ppt(x), ods, non-DRM epub, jpeg and png files) into an audible.
Once you do, you will be able to answer the question: will audio-comics replace the graphic-physical ones? Or will their consumption be simultaneous?