Hi all,
So, I wanted to play around on the laptop and see how to use the “Text to Speech” feature in Windows 7 ( my Dell Inspiron E1525 is 2.5 years old now … ) . I believe I read that it’s also there in XP and Vista.
Step 1: Configure your speaker voice and voice speed in Control Panel – Speech Recognition ( see screen shot below )
Step 2: Find your document with text to be read and cut and paste into Notepad.
Also, minimize or close other applications.
Step 3: Start Menu – type: Narrator to open Windows 7 Speech Narration program
Step 4: Toggle with mouse back to Notepad and “select some text” and the Narrator program should start talking.
NOTE: I had problems trying to use a Word Document directly so I switched to Notepad.
Also, the Narrator program likes to “read the current open application / window”. So by playing around with setting focus from the Narrator window to the Notepad window and selecting text to be read finally started working.
I found the speech to be a little off but much better than I remember from the past. The speech is no longer robotic.
I think it can be a little helpful to those who want to hear how reading the text sounds like even though it’s not 100% accurate.
Good Luck !
LA Guy
