HACKER Q&A
📣 Apples_Pom

Free text-to-speech desktop software with OCR?


As someone with ADHD, text-to-speech has literally revolutionised the quantity of text I can read - great both for hobby purposes and for university. All text-to-speech I've been able to find that works on desktop though seems to suck. Voice Aloud Reader on Android is what I primarily use and is fantastic with extensive utility but it's too limiting to have to use my phone all the time. Does anyone know any good text-to-speech software for desktop in a similar vein? Minimum functions I'm trying to get are OCR, rewind and fast forward per sentence, and display the PDF/text being read with a highlight on the portion currently being read. Free is optimal but paid is also good. It's been a bit since I've tried it but NVDA seemed not simple to use, and didn't make going through a chosen individual text easy. Thanks in advance.


  👤 Figs Accepted Answer ✓
I've never really gone looking for software like that, so I don't have any great suggestions for software that has everything you want integrated together already, but I did have a couple ideas reading your post.

(1) There are free tools for both OCR and text-to-speech that you could use if you want to try hacking up your own solution. I've used Tesseract for doing OCR from images successfully. It can take a bit of fiddling around depending on the nature of the image to get a good read out of it but it works. I've also used Speech Dispatcher on Linux to implement tools that periodically check for problems on the systems I support and yell at me (literally) if there is a problem that needs my immediate attention. Writing something that integrates the two nicely with all the features you want would probably be a lot of work, but a quick and dirty way to get the two programs to just read aloud some text from an image can be as simple as:

spd-say "`tesseract image.png stdout`"

if your text is clean enough for the OCR to pick it out without a lot of preprocessing.

(2) If you already have an Android app that does everything you want -- other than running on a phone instead of your desktop -- you might be able to just emulate Android on your desktop and use the app.