I recently ran across a really cool application called Narrator by the good folks at Dejal. This is a REALLY cool application for anyone who has ever written a story or play and wants to hear what it sounds like read aloud. You could, of course, enlist your group of friends to read it aloud for you, but that would involve coordinating schedules which is always a pain. Enter Narrator.

The idea here is that you can have the speech synthesis engine built into Mac OS X read the story aloud for you. You assign each character in your story or play a voice and color. You the go through your story and highlight the text for each character in the appropriate color. When you are all done, you have Narrator read the story aloud. It switches from voice to voice as it reads — picking the the voice that matches the color you assigned to the text. It also highlights the text as it is being read, which is great for students that are practicing their reading. If you couple this with any of the amazing voices from Cepstral, the quality is astounding. In addition, if you couple it with something like Audio Hijack Pro, would allow you to record the output to an audio file so you could listen to it later.

While this one isn’t free, it is cheap. Individual license is $14.95 and a site license is only $100.

Check it out!

–Pete