In the olden days (back when a bag of sweets was a penny and small boys rode bikes with baskets on the front down cobbled streets) we used to listen with mother. Now, we can get our computers to read the kids fairy tales with the likes of Expressivo text to speech. (Next stop, sentient time-travelling cyborgs coming back to massacre us all).

Expressivo reads out any text you care to point it in the direction of, whether it's a document, Web page or e-mail. You can paste text into the program window, read a document or HTML file directly, or choose to integrate the program with Internet Explorer, Firefox or Thunderbird. This latter option installs a small toolbar into the browser or e-mail client which can be used to listen to its contents with a single click.

Or that's the theory. And it works in general principle, just not so well with the more cluttered Web sites out there. That's because if there are lots of top or side menus, Expressivo reads these before the main text, and that's pretty irritating. Still, you can get around this by highlighting the body text, although obviously that isn't quite as convenient as one-clicking.

The program reads aloud in the voice of an American woman, or 'Jennifer' as Expressivo calls her in an effort to personalise the girl. That christening, of course, would be a complete waste of time if her voice sounded like a Speak & Spell machine after it's been dropped in the bath.

Luckily, it doesn't. Jenny does sound a little mechanical, it's fair to say, but not gratingly so. Her speech rhythms aren't quite spot on, and she says some phrases too quickly, leaning perilously close to garbling them, but that's the exception rather than the rule. Occasionally her pronunciation isn't very good, particularly when saying words with several meanings (such as "live"), but the overall quality of the speech produced is quite serviceable.

So what sort of tasks can this be used for? Reading your e-mails aloud when you're busy doing other things, for example, or reading an e-book when your eyes are too tired to look at the screen. Expressivo can even output to an MP3 or WAV file, so you can drag and drop readings onto your MP3 player and listen to them on the move.

The program also comes with a few extra plug-ins, such as a built-in RSS news reader (which reads feeds out loud, naturally) and a speaking Windows clock. Disappointingly, the latter doesn't tell you what the time will be after so many pips.

Verdict
The speech isn't perfect, but Expressivo does a decent job of making itself understood, on the whole. It's also handy being able to export e-mails (or any text) onto a portable device for later listening. The main downside is that the program can be confused by complex Web sites, although it's not difficult to work around this.

Company: IVO Software

Contact: 00 48 58 783 4951

Tags: speech synthesis internet explorer wav email client html element clients android speech technology