Verbalize is a text-to-speech utility that comes in handy whenever you wish to create audiobooks on your Mac computer. This application might also prove to be of good use to people with visual impairments or reading disabilities who wish to listen to written works from their PC.
All you need to do in order to work with Verbalize is to enter the text you wish to convert to speech and select the desired voice profile. You can pre-listen the resulted audiobook and save it to an audio file. What's more, you can also import plain text files for conversion.
A disadvantage of this program is the fact that you don't have access to its latest version if you download and install the app from its homepage. Furthermore, in my testing, it failed to update the application. The only solution I could find was to update the program using the Mac Informer client.
Another aspect I don't like is that Verbalize lets you export the results to AIFF files or as audiobooks in iTunes app. Popular formats such as MP3, OGG or FLAC are not supported yet.
Since the program comes without a price tag and offers some helpful features, I'd say it's worth trying this text-to-speech tool. The app is very simple to handle, lets you choose from various speech profiles, and offers quality results.
v6.1 [May 7, 2010]
- A couple of bugs have been quelched here and there.
- Sometimes MacinTalk just doesn't get a sentence right because of emphasis problems. To add emphasis to a word, type option-6 directly before the word (no spaces). To decrease emphasis, type option-5 before it.
