Balabolka is a free text-to-speech engine that boasts quality and flexibility worthy of a paid app.
What make this app stand out are its options. Text-to-speech apps generally produce speech that clocks in at around the same quality level ? sometimes it?s fine and other times, it falls pretty far from the mark. What other apps don?t have, however, is Balabolka?s great speech configuration options and excellent selection of settings.
Balabolka allows you to save text as WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG or WMA. It can also read the clipboard content and view text from documents saved as DOC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, ODT, PDF or RTF files. It will automatically detect any TTS voices you have installed on your computer and, of course, you can download more voices, both free and paid, from the internet.
It?s worth taking your time to check out all of Balabolka?s options. It?s really useful for file management, even allowing you to split and convert documents. It also has a timer, so you can set it to read before bedtime, for example, and can completely be controlled by hotkeys. There are bunches more ? the options that will interest you will surely depend on what you intend to use Balabolka for.
The quality of the speech produced by Balabolka varies greatly, but you can have a major influence by picking the reading voice carefully and tweaking the settings so that you deal with pauses, speed and unusual words in the most efficient way. While Balabolka?s not perfect, it?s very good, and in many cases is just as good, if not better, than similar paid apps.
Balabolka is a seriously flexible and entirely free text-to-speech engine.
Balabolka supports the following formatsText: TXT, DOC, DOCX, FB2, PDF, HTML, RTF
Audio: MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG
- Excellent configuration options
- Timer
- File management tools
- Supports a large range of file formats
- Text-to-speech quality can vary
