Panopreter is a program that will allow you to listen to written phrases or text files in many languages. The application uses Microsoft’s text-to-speech voice engines that you have installed on your PC, so it means that not all the languages will be available to hear, unless you download them from Internet.
In its intuitive and easy-to-use interface you will find two options to test the program's reading capability. First, there is the option "Read a File", where a document file can be opened and read. The following file extensions are supported by the program, txt, rtf, doc, htm, html, and mht. The second option is 'Instant speak' where you will be able to write a sentence, or phrase, and by pressing the button Speak, you'll hear what you wrote. In addition, there's a box where you can paste a text from the clipboard and save it as a text file.
A good feature is that you can save what you hear as an audio file (.wav) and hear it later as many times as you want.
In general, it can be said that voices sound rather artificial, and even though the program does what the developers promise, its functions are quite basic. Besides, XP users will need to setup extra voices to get better and more natural results.
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