1st Read It Aloud! is a text recognition software that can read any selected text, from any application. It supports numerous male or female voices, in many languages, so you may choose Julia or Eddie, Alex or Wanda, or some other voice to read your e-mail, while you do something else. It also supports both old SAPI4 and new SAPI5 speech synthesis technologies.
You only have to install the application and the language pack you want, and then select the text and listen to the voice reading your documents, e-mails, notes,etc. There are hot keys you can assign for each voice, so you can quickly choose between them, because you may prefer Sidney to read your kids a story, and Peter to read the boring 'read me' files, or vice versa. You can customize the voices to your liking by adjusting the speed, volume and the pitch of every voice.
You have the possibility of downloading additional voices from the Internet. I did that and I was impressed by the quality of the voice, that sounded very real, and that could read text with intonation, different from the robotic voices I've heard.
With 1st Read It Aloud! you can correct pronunciation of any word, or tell the program not to read some special characters.
Pluses: You get to download high quality voices that you can customize.
Drawbacks / flaws:
In conclusion: It is very easy to use and you may get to like it.
