I have been a long-time user of NaturalReader, initially having bought version 6.6, which over time, I managed to upgrade online, up to version 9 in fact, before being informed that I was no longer entitled to any more free upgrades. Being also a long-time Linux user, I loathe paying for software, especially where there is a perfectly adequate free alternative available. Well, there wasn't in this instance, on either Windows or Linux - hence, the purchase, along the lines of $40 if memory serves!
In my opinion, the speech-engine used by NaturalReader is by far the best available, and which is licensed by NaturalReader from the mega-corp, AT&T. Although the Google speech-engine is very good, IMO, it still falls quite a bit behind its AT&T counterpart, particularly where higher speech-rates are concerned, though this 'edge' comes at a cost. AT&T's approach uses very large libraries of speech samples, or the phonemes-parts thereof, whereas Google, judging by its speech-engine footprint, uses a different technique, and though smaller, is less effective. So, although the AT&T (henceforth NaturalReader, or 'NR') approach necessitates the use of more disk-space/processing-time, the end-results are I think, worth the effort.
Just recently, out of curiosity more than anything else, I searched out a demo of the latest-and-greatest (sic) NR online, deciding to give it a spin. What immediately caught my eye was the installation size, a whopping 200meg - version 6.6 was about 25meg, whereas version 9 comes in at just under 50meg. So I figured that all those extra megs must be doing something interesting, and sure enough, NR now comes with a built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature, which piqued my interest still further.
Given that I'm stuck with using long-defunct VirtualBox'ed Windows XP's (Win7 being both too slow and taking up too much disk-space) I thought this would prove to be a problem. Imagine my surprise when it installed without a hitch. Then imagine my disgust at finding that it would not run without NET 3.0 having to be installed! After downloading and installing this, re-running NR saw it spring to life. Or maybe 'lurch' is more apt - it's painfully slow to load, and more so in operation! But imagine my disgust at finding that this 200meg behemoth doesn't include any proper voices - you are stuck with using Microsoft's Sam, which is, ahem, less than adequate. So off I go asearching again, this time for a disk containing my 'Mike-US' voice for NR 9, all 700megs worth. After installing this, I was relieved to find that it was detected and worked without a problem, albeit as I mentioned, a mite sluggishly.
Next up, a check of NR's OCR prowess. Or at least that was the intention. In practice, it crashed every time I tried it! So, the main reason for installing it in the first place proved to be its epic-fail. Sucks huge.
But my main reason for this blog entry is to point out one simple fact. Although NaturalReader has 'progressed', at least version-wise, from 6.6 to 14 on my watch, the speech quality of the files it produces has not improved one iota! What you are getting now for your money ($120 for the 'Pro' version) is a piece of bloatware that NaturalReader keeps adding bits to in order to justify the version (and price) increases. Versions 6 through to 9 were definite lack-lustre affairs. These softwares were so badly designed, that, for example, you could not search & edit a piece of text simultaneously - you needed to close the Search dialogue prior to editing text due to the shoddy 'modal' nature of the Search menu employed. This was barely acceptable with Windows 3.1, never mind Win-XP and beyond. NaturalReader 14 fares little better in my opinion. Huge file size, dependent on NET, therefore slow as hell, topped off with crashes at the bits that may be of interest.
Do yourself a favour and leave this dog alone. Granted, NaturalReader produces some of the best text-to-speech output there is, but kudos must go to AT&T for this, not the still-lame attempt by NR to 'package this TTS-engine proficiently. If you must go with NaturalReader, search out version 9. Primitive as hell, feature-wise, but it's fast, and sound quality is still the same as with version 14, and it's NR's best attempt, before it became completely dependent upon M$ NET.
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