Adding audio narration is now essential to deliver content for consumption (e.g., eLearning materials and audio guides). In this post, I introduce you to some of the easiest ways to generate audio narrations, i.e., from text to speech.
Here are some of the easy-to-use free tools that can generate decent-sounding audio from text:
- eSpeak TTS
- Balabolka
- PowerPointLabs narration
Based on experience, the easiest way to insert TTS (text-to-speech) directly in PowerPoint is via the PowerPointLabs narration tool, which uses the default Microsoft Voices (e.g., David, Zira, Mark). But, for those who want to put some extra effort, there are also online tools that allow you to use human-sounding neural voices:
- Microsoft Azure Speech Services
- IBM Watson Neural Voice