Text To Speech For Free With Balabolka [Windows]

The solution to this problem is text-to-speech, a task that’s becoming increasingly useful as digital books and other forms of electronic text become more popular. There’s options about, one of which is Balabolka, a free text-to-speech program for Windows.

The Basics Of Balabolka

Getting started with Balabolka doesn’t require much instruction. When you start up the program, you are presented with a large, blank text area and a few audio controls. The text area will accept text straight from your clipboard, and you can start hearing text-to-speech by placing your cursor where you’d like the speech to begin. The controls at the top of the text area focus on volume and rate. The function of the volume control is obvious, of course, and the rate control determines the speed at which the voice will move through the text. Faster speeds will reduce the time required to move through a piece of text, but may make the text-to-speech conversion harder to understand.

Advanced Text-To-Speech Features

Besides the ability to change the rate and volume of the speech rendered with Balabolka, there are also some more advanced features available, which can be found under the Options menu tab. From here, you can make some minor changes to the pitch of the voice, or you can open a Settings menu.
In the Settings menu you’ll find a few options that can prove helpful. Under the Reading tab you will find the option to ignore certain characters while reading. This can be helpful if you have a piece of text with erroneous or strange characters that are tripping up the text-to-speech translation. Under the Pauses tab, you can force the voice to pause for a specified period of time at the end of a paragraph or sentence. In the Text tab, you can automatically remove certain formatting features in order to alter the way the text-to-speech translation sounds.