If I write a porn novel, I’m a sick freak. But if I write a horror book about a man ripping women apart and taking sexual satisfaction in it, that’s “gripping stuff” that will pick up an audience. A war book with gory details is popular, but romance novels are still only “mushy stuff” for sissies to read. Sex and love are still viewed with suspicion, while violence and “might makes right” are worshiped even by people with no belief in God.

Where did we go so wrong that sex is evil, but violence is good? How did we reach the point when battles and orgies of death became preferable to sexual orgies? Why it is considered healthy to want to kill and eliminate opposing viewpoints with violence, but wanting to caress a bared breast is seen as wicked and sinful? How did we become so fucking insane that the act of sexual connection between people is seen as more vile than the act of destroying another life? (Or culture?) And why aren’t more people upset by this celebration of violence and shunning of all sexualities?

And this is why I’m pulling away from people. Because what they celebrate, I find to be extremely offensive. I think everyone has gone fucking crazy, and they refuse to see how sick they’ve become. And I want no part of that violence lust culture. I shun it, and I choose to wander off and fap by myself. Sure, I’m sex crazy, but I’d still consider this a healthier crazy than “the world would be better off if we could kill ___ people.”

I’m currently trying out Ivona and I find the voices to be very natural and human-like. Doesn’t sound robotic or computerized like NaturalReader voices (Acapela, NeoSpeech, AT&T etc.) or Microsoft Anna (the worst!). I don’t know how the TTS of Dragon sounds like, but if you think it sounds robotic/computerized, there’s a good chance you’ll find Ivona much more human-like and natural.

Of course, I don’t know whether Ivona would send you “scrambling to hunt for an extra space or comma where there is no problem” (it doesn’t seem to though). You’ll have to try their Trial to find it out (or just paste the text on their online version*).

* The one here can read very long lengths of text (not limited to 250 characters): http://www.ivona.com/us/recordings/ Just paste in the text, choose a voice and click Play. There will be a pause between sentences to load the voice from server. This pause will not be there in a local installation of the application.

Anyway I understand you have already spent quite a lot of money on TTS (why didn’t you try out trial versions first?) so you will probably stick with Dragon. That’s OK if it works well for you.

But for myself, I’ve bought Dragon Naturally Speaking, and am now using the TTS reader that came with it. It is a computerized voice closer to Sam than the natural reader, but it respects punctuation better and doesn’t make up random gaps in sentences, sending me scrambling to hunt for an extra space or comma where there is no problem; natural reader just hiccupped. So for now, I like it.

But thank you for posting the link,and for the correction. And for visiting my blog…and for commenting. =^)

I’m not sure of the features of the full Reader that the free MiniReader does not have, except I think Mini lacks MP3 conversion. But I want to make it clear that you can buy just the voices and start using the Free MiniReader instead of buying the Full Reader with voices (if you don’t need those extra features).

TRIAL available: You can download the Free MiniReader and try out the voices for 30 days.

PS: I’m not affiliated with Ivona. I just thought of sharing here since none of the comments above or your post mention it.

Dragon is on my list of stuff to buy, but it’s quite a bit more expensive as it’s not just a TTS engine I’m buying. I really wish Dragon would sell the TTS engine as a standalone product, but that’s just sour grapes on my part.

Mp3 wasn’t useful to me at all, as I was using it for editing of e-books. Also, I couldn’t change the words in the ebooks so that my computer could understand them, because then my human readers would be left scratching their heads a lot at my new spelling system.

I’m not really happy working without a TTS readers, though as my more recent releases have had more spelling mistakes than I had back with the PC reading my stuff out loud. But the thing is, NR is so grating that I don’t work more than an hour before I want to walk away and grouch and gripe. Not really conducive to remaining productive.

Matthew, thank you for sharing your take on the software. I’m sure future readers of this review can find some of your ideas useful if they want to try tweaking NR to better suit their needs.

The big draw to this software for me was the Graham UK voice. So far this is the best TTS Voice that comes closest to being natural in my ears. The US voices they have were OK. But Grahams was a deal maker for me.

I have been using NaturalReader 9 for about two weeks now and am coming to understand the big flaws that the software has. Primarily the Pronunciation Editor is incredibly limited. It works pretty well on big words. But on small words like air, ear, dove(verb), mage. It’s impossible to get them to sound just right. Also there is no way to get the software to recognize context. A few times I had to go into the original document and just change the word completely to get the context correct so the reader understood the difference between wound and wownd. Now if I can only trick it to know the difference between dove verb and dove noun.

I just wish p. editor had ways to force a word to say long As or long Os. Playing with the word only seems to work on words that are over 4 letters long. Anything shorter and it just doesn’t sound right.

You mentioned its difficult to edit the document that your listening to. I also found this difficult UNTIL I found that you can change the settings to have the reader read sentence by sentence. Whenever I hear an odd word I go into the pronunciation editor and start fiddling. Then pick back up my book where I left off.

After I finally got MOST of the kinks worked out I started using the MP3 format and, again its nice not having to be tethered to the computer while the reader is talking to me. Plus compiling the MP3 takes only a few minutes to get the audio file compiled.

Please wright a review of Dragon Naturally if you actually do buy the software. If you don’t buy it, look into getting Graham UK voice. I think its the best voice available. And if you want any pointers or if you’d like me to share my P. editor file with you, let me know.