TTS technology is advancing rapidly.


Loquendo has a new Voice, Allison, that "can speak with genuine expression and emotion". The quality is remarkable. The downside is the very high cost of Loquendo Voices and the difficulty in obtaining them in small quantities.
See: Loquendo TTS Demo



An interesting new alternative is TTS from IVONA. (IVONA Text To Speech | TTS Voice | Text to Voice).
The British voice Amy is a 22kHz voice that has excellent speech quality and is SAPI 5 compatible.
You can download a 30 day free trial from IVONA. Individual Voices can be purchased for about $45 each per computer installation.


The IVONA and Loquendo Voices can be installed "stand alone". They are SAPI 5 compatible and work properly with MapPoint when set as the system default Voice.

The Loquendo's voices are now more impressive than ever. But I'm sure I couldn't afford them, even though I don't see the price listed.

The $45 option sounds good, too, though.

The current best text to speech software is Text Speaker. It has customizable pronunciation, reads anything on your screen, and it even has talking reminders. The bundled voices are well priced and sound very human. Easily converts blogs, email, and more to MP3 for listening on the go.