Sometimes you need your documents read aloud to you because you are on the bus. Or maybe you just prefer to listening than reading for personal preference. Meanwhile, for a certain group of people, they just do not have ability to read. Statistics reveals that over 750 million youth and adults around the world lack reading skills or deal with illiteracy, and 285 million people worldwide are estimated to have some form of visual impairment, 39 million of whom are blind.
How to make these needs come true? Text-to-speech technology makes above possible, and you can easily use it to have your PDF document read aloud to you. In this article, we’re going to cover what is text to speech technology and how to have a PDF document read aloud.
What Is TTS Technology And How It Works?
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Text-to-speech, abbreviated as TTS, is a type of assistive technology that reads digital text aloud. The technology behind TTS has evolved over the last few decades. It is now possible to produce very natural-sounding speech that includes changes to pitch, rate, pronunciation, and inflection.
TTS is characterized by its convenience and accessibility feature that helps people who need additional assistance to hear text that's printed on-screen. The scene we often see the adoption of TTS technology is in smart assistants, like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. When you speak to ask these assistants, they will “reply” you, specifically read to you from a predetermined library of words and phrases. TTS technology is the premise for these system to operate.
Generally speaking, TTS has distinctive benefits in the following three aspects.
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Accessibility: It provides access to people who have learning disabilities as well as literacy issues by offering an alternative way to get information.
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Enhanced Learning: By allowing users to see text and hear it read aloud simultaneously, it can help improve comprehension, recall, vocabulary skills, motivation, and confidence.
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Mobility & Freedom: It can turn any digital content into a multimedia experience, so people can listen to news, blog articles, or even a PDF document, on-the-go or while multitasking.
How To Have A PDF Document Read Aloud?
Since TTS technology brings so many benefits, how it combines with PDF document and makes it read aloud? Here, we’ll take PDF Reader Pro, an all-in-one PDF reader app installed on over 80 million devices in over 200 countries around the world, for example.
To enable TTS function, you can follow the steps below:
1. On the reading page, click TTS
2. Select Play
3. Click Previous Page
4. Click Pause
While reading a PDF file or form field, you can customize the experience by setting language and choosing the speed of the reading to best suit your needs.
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Under Language, select your preferred language and lifelike voices;
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Use the Speed slider to change the reading speed according to your needs;
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Click the checkbox of Continuous Reading for automatic page turning.
However, it should be noted that TTS tool is only available for the documents with the written text while the PDF files with scanned texts in the form of images are excluded.
Download PDF Reader Pro and have your PDF read aloud with your preference now.
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