Are your children learning to read or find ‘bedtime story time’ delightful? Do you want to turn those activities into a “multisensory” experience? Check out these websites capable of reading texts aloud!
Reading to little children aloud is an excellent method to expose them to books, phonics, spelling, and storytelling. If you’re searching for a fun (but informative) approach to entertaining kids, it’s a wonderful alternative to video games or online browsing. However, one can’t always be present to act as the narrator. For those moments, having books read aloud can help keep your kids interested and learning at their own speed.
Although there are several free and paid read-aloud websites for children –which have voice actors reciting children’s books out loud– these webpages don’t include all books within their catalogues. For that reason, we recommend text to speech tools so your kids can enjoy any story they desire to hear.
Text to speech, also known as TTS, is an assistive technology that, through speech synthesis, generates artificial human discourse. In other words, TTS converts any text-based material into audio, allowing anyone to listen to their favourite books, websites, documents and other content.
Due to the increasing usage of these assets and technological developments, computerised speech has evolved to the point of sounding like an actual person. Therefore, TTS voices can engage people of any age and articulate clearly for little kids’ comprehension. Hence, we gathered some of the best web-based text to speech softwares that can work as a read-aloud website for children.
Woord
Woord is the easiest way to transform your pdf, txt, doc(x), pages, odt, ppt(x), ods, non-DRM epub, jpeg and png files into realistic voices. It allows young users to listen to their stories in a variety of languages (and dialects), including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Dutch, Norwegian, Korean, Polish, Swedish, etc.
Furthermore, your kids may customise their narrators. Woord has 50 distinct voices (male, female, and gender-neutral), sophisticated options for speeding up or slowing down the reading pace, and an SSML editor for rearranging tones, pauses, and pronunciations, among other features. Try it out for free by creating an account. That way, you can turn 20,000 characters of text into audio every month.
Azure Microsoft
Azure Microsoft is a service that turns text into remarkable audio output. The platform provides varied speaking styles and emotional tones to adjust to your use case. As a result, users may pick from 270 diverse spokespeople in 119 different languages and accents.
What’s more, people can personalise the tempo, tone, pronunciation, pauses, and other aspects to their preference. Azure Microsoft‘s free plan may be limited in terms of features. Nevertheless, it permits the conversion of up to 0.5 million characters into 5 hours of audio every month.
NaturalReader
NaturalReader is a text-to-speech desktop service that anybody may download for personal use. This basic programme, which uses natural-sounding voices, can read any text to you while highlighting each word. Also, kids may adjust the speed, volume, and other parameters. For those who require it, it even includes a Dyslexia font.
Overall, NaturalReader‘s free plan allows multiple files and includes unlimited free voice usage, 20 minutes per day of premium voice usage, a Chrome extension with unlimited free spokespeople, and a pronunciation editor.
We hope your kids enjoy storytelling through these text-to-speech read-aloud websites!