For those lucky people who own Macs there are some almost mind-blowingly good synthetic voices available. This allows for the creation of audio files from text in cases where "real" audio usually isn't available (e.g. from Wikipedia, articles, etc.)

Examples of such voices for many different languages (with demos) can be found here:

http://www.assistiveware.com/product/infovox-iv...

Does anyone happen to know if there is anything remotely on a par with this available for Windows 7 PCs? I've been doing numerous web-searches for a Russian SAPI 5 voice, but there just doesn't seem to be one available anywhere!

(And to think my very first computer was a Mac! Why-oh-why did I sell out to Bill Gates! Grrr!)



UPDATE:

I see there are some quite decent Windows voices available here:

http://www.cereproc.com/sapivoices

The ones for English, French and German are pretty good - the others less so. (And no sign of Russian...)

There is a good Software to do this in Windows, too. You can download it in https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1NAyMVDYe8fMVV...

In this link I put only in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Good learning!

Thanks, for the link :-)

I wonder how much it would cost to integrate to LingQ?

http://www.acapela-group.com/acapela-voice-as-a...

That's a great link ;-) The quality seems very good, and they offer a good range of languages. I see they even have a voice for Faroese!!!

http://www.acapela-group.com/portuguese-45-text...

(However it isn't stated up-front what they are charging - which never a very good sign!)