The software which reads text present on a notepad or docs and save it in audio clip through a professional voice are called as Text To Speech Program. We had seen VozMe as a text to speech converter which doesn’t even require a software and does all the work online. I must say Balabolka beats all the Top Online Text to Speech Mp3 Online tools although this a software download application.
Balabolka is one of the Text to Speech converter software which converts any written text documents into corresponding audio clip which can be saved and played. Balabolka is a Russian word which means chatterer. Balabolka is a free software which can used for lifetime and you require no license to run this on your PC.
The basic purpose of Balabolka can be easily understood by this conversion map
docs files into mp4 audio file
HTML File into wav audio clip
notepad files into mp3 audio file
PDF files into m4a audio file
MS Word into ogg audio file
HTML File into wav audio clip
notepad files into mp3 audio file
PDF files into m4a audio file
MS Word into ogg audio file
Balabolka can read text from wide range of files including Microsoft Office Files like Word, web pages, text files, ebooks, rtf files and other various text media. The on-screen text can be saved as WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG or WMA file format. This program can also run various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI), also allowing you to alter voice parameters including pitch and rate. By default Balabolka comes with SAPI 4 and SAPI 5 version of Speech Application Programming Interface.
Balabolka is a portable software which does the work by running it from a USB drive provided that your computer has at least one voice installed. It uses Text-To-Speech engine to read text files and you can download it from Microsoft site. If you have TTS installed on your PC you will see a list of available voices on the main menu of Balabolka. Its prefers SAPI 5 as it has more voices available.
The default voice is Microsoft Anna but the good thing is that its compatible with wide ranges of voice which can be bought at AT & T Natural Voices, Cepstral Voices, Acapela Group, NeoSpeech & Nuance which provide an excellent quality of natural speech. Or if you prefer to use free voices then you can download Microsoft voices of Mary, Sam and Mike, American English, British English from anywhere, but when you have it at Cross Plus A why you need to visit other webpages.
One notable thing in this software is that it implements the spell checking engine Command Spelter API (CSAPI) for checking the spellings and lot more than just spell check. It supports English, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Korean, Portuguese, Romanian,Spanish, Russian & Ukrainian. Apart from above features this software includes features like
Magnifier It includes an amazing square-shaped magnifier which provides amazing clarity of 2X, 4X, 8X, 16X zoom in option. This can be directly opened by a shortcut key known as F2.
Case Converter Balabolka is amazingly a case converter software too. It can perform the following actions with case converting with shortcut keys too provided for each
- Upper Case
- Lower Case
- Inverted Case
- Title Case
- Sentence Case
Skins The interface of Balabolka supports lot many skins to choose from BlueGauze, Neutral, Sapphire, Vienna and WLM.
Spell Checker This program can spell check for the text provided by you. You can also download different modules for spell check from the developer website.
Multiple Tab Documents You can open multiple tabs one by one allowing you to perform quicker actions for multiple files. This feature can be handy when you have large documents to be converted to audio files.
Compare Two Files Under Tools > Compare Two Files with shortcut CTRL + E you find a tool to compare two text files with different sets of permutations and combinations.
Extract Text From Files This utility will let you extract text from Docs, HTML, FB2 to text file allowing you have bypass any code.
Short Cut Keys As most of the professional software does, Balabolka does includes shortcut keys for all the basic functionalities. Few shortcut key are listed below
- F1 Help
- F2 Opens Magnifier
- F3 Find Next
- F5 Read Aloud
- F8 Read Selected Text
- F9 Read Clipboard Aloud
- F12 Full Screen
- Shift + F7 Spell Checker
- Shift + F6 Settings
- Shift + F5 Audio Files
- other basic keys like CTRL + O to open files, CTRL + S to save files etc., etc.,. These keys can viewed at navigation bar and it purpose.
How to Download & Install Balabolka The Balabolka software can be download from www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm and its a freeware. Unzip the zip file and click on balabolka to proceed with the installation (there is nothing much in installation) and the installation complete within 5 seconds. Here its how the front interface of Balabolka looks like.
How to Convert Text into Audio Clip For converting a text provided into audio clip you have two ways of loading the media
- Open a File from File > Open
- Copy Paste the text directly to Balabolka body content
The Balabolka software works on two environment namely SAPI 4 and SAPI 5, SAPI 5 is the advanced version of former and brings in a lot of easy plug and play options, so its better you make sure that you are in SAPI 5 or else SAPI 4 ask for much into programming interface.
Here is the direct pasted content which I have used
Now the next step is very easy which is to save the text provided into audio format which you can hear. For this you need to click on ‘Save Audio File‘.
Balabolka supports saving of audio clips in wav, mp3, mp4, m4a, ogg, wma, m4b and awb formats. This formats can be used played on any media that you like, preferable you would be opting for format which you like, I like mp3 and mp4 formats.
Wait for sometime and your Text has been converted to Audio File as you have desired.
And you have saved a text document into a media which can be heard from media players like windows media player, VLC Player etc.,.
Various Versions of Balabolka
- Portable Version – Portable version of Balabolka doesn’t even require installation and can be run from a USB Drive provided that you have once voice installed on your pc.
- Normal Version – This is loaded with all the default options included in the Balabolka and its the official stable version.
- Beta Version – Presently the beta version is 2.0 which supports unicode and this is available for testing only.
Balabolka is compatible with all Windows Environment, also with Unix, Linux and other environments. This is a wonderful Text to Speech Converter which totally free, completly portable and very easy to use.