11 Free and Open Source Text to Speech Tools for e-Learning! Open source software can be used as we wish, without long-term commitments and with a community of professionals that extend and support them. This post is a post of the series "Free e-Learning Resources" (http://t.co/Y4u3YOd) and I am going to talk about free and open source text-to-speech tools for e-Learning. Read more: http://t.co/msWSgO5 => If you know a free or open source text-to-speech tool that is not included in the list I will highly appreciate if you write a comment with a link!

1. Free and Open Source Text to Speech Tools for e-Learning by Christopher Pappas M.B.A., M.Ed. eLearning Consultant

2. Free e-Learning Resourceby eFront Learning blog 14 Free and Open Source Authoring Tools for e-Learning 17 Free Stock Photos Sites for e-Learning 8 Free and Open Source Web Conferencing (Online Meetings, Webinars) Tools for e-Learning 34 Free e-Learning Books 6 Free e-Learning Glossaries 31 Free Storyboard Templates for e-Learning Top 10 Open Source e-Learning Projects to Watch for 2011 11 Free and Open Source Text to Speech Tools for e-Learning

3. The MBROLA Project The aim of the MBROLA project, initiated by the TCTS Lab of the FacultéPolytechnique de Mons (Belgium), is to obtain a set of speech synthesizers for as many languages as possible, and provide them free for non-commercial applications. 1

4. The Festival Speech Synthesis System Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (British and American), and Spanish) though English is the most advanced. 2

5. The Mary MARY is an open-source, multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis platform written in Java. It was originally developed as a collaborative project of DFKI's Language Technology lab and the Institute of Phonetics at Saarland University and is now being maintained by DFKI. As of version 4.3, MARY TTS supports German, British and American English, Telugu, Turkish, and Russian; more languages are in preparation. MARY TTS comes with toolkits for quickly adding support for new languages and for building unit selection and HMM-based synthesis voices. 3

6. YAKiToMe YAKiToMe is a free text to speech. Uses the world's best text to speech (TTS) software. Upload documents, cut and paste text or link to feeds. Text reader converts text to speech automatically. Download audio and podcasts. It's fast and easy to use. Get started right away! No software to download or install. 4

7. SpokenText SpokenText lets you easily convert text in to speech. Record (English, French, Spanish or German) PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, and web pages, and convert them to speech automatically. Create .mp3 or .m4b (Audio Book) recordings (in English, French, Spanish and German) of any text content on your computer or mobile phone. 5

8. eSpeak eSpeak uses a "formant synthesis" method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings. Google has integrated eSpeak, an open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, in its online translation service Google Translate. The move allow users of Google Translate to hear translations spoken out loud (text-to-speech) by clicking the speaker icon beside some translations. 6

9. Praat Praat is a free scientific software program for the analysis of speech in phonetics. It has been designed and continuously developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the University of Amsterdam. It can run on a wide range of operating systems, including various Unix versions, Mac and Microsoft Windows (95, 98, NT4, ME, 2000, XP, Vista). The program also supports speech synthesis, including articulatory synthesis. 7

10. FreeTTS FreeTTS is a speech synthesis system written entirely in the JavaTM programming language. It is based upon Flite: a small run-time speech synthesis engine developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Flite is derived from the Festival Speech Synthesis System from the University of Edinburgh and the FestVox project from Carnegie Mellon University. 8

11. Festvox The Festvox project aims to make the building of new synthetic voices more systemic and better documented, making it possible for anyone to build a new voice. 9

12. Flite Flite (festival-lite) is a small, fast run-time synthesis engine developed at CMU and primarily designed for small embedded machines and/or large servers. 10

13. The Epos Speech Synthesis System Epos is a language independent rule-driven Text-to-Speech (TTS) system primarily designed to serve as a research tool. Epos is (or tries to be) independent of the language processed, linguistic description method, and computing environment. 11

14. thank YOU!