Natural Reader is text to voice software. I've been using it for the past several years for pretty much any text that can be copy and pasted and is more than three sentences long which means that most of my contact with this and most other websites has come through it. There are a number of text to voice programs and I tried a fair few before settling on Natural Reader. While I don't remember the names of any of the others I do remember the two major problems being the actual voice and starting and stopping. The voices were harsh and mechanical in a way that made them literally hard to understand let alone listen to for any length of time. Natural reader has a voice that makes it about half way to normal human speech. This isn't pleasant but if you can imagine GLaDOS reading to you you'll have a pretty good idea of what it's like. As I recall it took me some time to acclimate to it but by and large I've grown so used to it that I hardly notice. Regarding the starting and stopping, my previous readers always started from the beginning and required that I manually find where it left off and delete all of the prior text from the field. With Natural Reader it starts at the beginning of a text and reads like one would expect and if you want to jump forward or back just click the sentence in question and it will go there instantly. It pauses between sentences which sounds natural but if it encounters a long enough sentence it will split them into separate chunks which create weird pauses. It also has trouble with same spelling homonyms where they are pronounced differently. "Wind" as in winding a clock is always pronounce like "wind" blowing for instance. These quirks aside it has a huge lexicon and it's pretty rare that I notice a word confusing it.
The base version of it is free. Their are multiple paid versions of it starting at one hundred dollars which seems pretty steep but offers a number of great features like text to mp3 and more voices. I'm still using the free version because I have enough stuff to listen to already and I have to say the version I'm using is one of the least obnoxious pieces of proprietary free software I've ever used. It works offline and just does what I want and basically nothing else. It doesn't spam ads or try to get me to buy the full version every thirty seconds. The best part is my free version never updates so I don't worry about them ruining it for me at some time in the future. I can't promise that the present distribution has this as I've used at least two and I have vague memories of a third that wasn't as good briefly between them. This is probably my most used application after my web browser. I'd have gotten through far fewer written works or messed up my eyes or both if not for it. If you want to try it out it can be found here.
IRON NODER XV: LAST SECOND BARE BONES IRON NODER FREAKOUT!