Glossary

Article

An "Article" in TextAloud is the text area on the main window, beneath the panels containing the Title/Voice Fields and Pitch/Speed slider controls. The speaking functions of TextAloud speak the text loaded in an article.

There are two different ways (or modes) of working with articles: Single-Article Mode and Multi-Article Mode. In each mode, only one article is visible from the main window. The difference is that in Single-Article Mode, new articles always replace the current article, meaning there is never more than one article available. In Multi-Article Mode, articles are kept in a list, and new articles are continually added to the list.

Bit Rate

Bit rate is measured in kbps, or kilobits per second. For audio files this rate corresponds directly to file size: larger bitrates mean larger audio files, and longer encoding times for MP3 and WMA files.

Engine

A TTS Engine is software that actually performs conversion of text to audio. Engines are supplied by various vendors to be plugged into programs like TextAloud, and other applications that utilize Text-To-Speech. The developer of an engine will typically offer many voices to choose from, but all the voices will use the vendor's engine for the text to audio conversion.

Converting text to audio is a complex process, and engines use different techniques to accomplish it. For this reason, engines vary widely in the quality of audio produced and system resource (cpu and memory) requirements.

MP3

MP3 is short for Motion Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer 3. MP3 produces CD-quality sound in a compressed file that can be transferred quickly, and played on any multimedia computer with MP3 player software.

Sample Rate

When you listen to digital audio, you are actually listening to many discrete 'samples' of sound. Sample rate is a measure of the number of samples per second, and can be thought of as the resolution or accuracy of the audio. A high sample rate means that the resolution of the recording is high, thus very "accurate". Digital music is typically recorded at sample rates of 44.1kHz and higher. Digital speech can use much lower sample rates without loss of sound quality. High quality speech can be generated at 16kHz; telephony applications use a sample rate of 8kHz.

One kiloHertz (kHz) is one thousand cycles per second.

TTS

TTS stands for Text-To-Speech. It is the process of converting text to digital audio.

Voice

Each TTS engine has multiple voices associated with it. As an engine converts text to audio, the voice manipulates the audio to produce the sounds you actually hear.

WMA

The Windows Media Audio format for digital sound, launched by Microsoft as an alternative to the MP3 format. You will probably hear better sound quality from MP3 files, but WMA compression is generally better, so WMA files tend to be smaller than MP3 files.

Windows Clipboard

The Windows Clipboard is a standard part of the Windows operating system, and is used as a short-term storage area for text and/or images. Whenever you "Cut" or "Copy" something from an application, the information is placed on the Windows Clipboard. Applications commonly offer a "Paste" function that allows information on the clipboard to be inserted into the application.

TextAloud monitors the Windows Clipboard for changes, allowing the clipboard to be used to transfer text from any application to a TextAloud article. The clipboard can contain both text and image data, but TextAloud extracts text only, ignoring any images. So copying text into TextAloud can be done just by highlighting an area of text in an application, and pressing Ctrl+C to "Copy" the text to the clipboard.

The Windows Clipboard is used for many purposes on your computer, such as copying and pasting text within a word processor application. TextAloud will be aware of these clipboard updates, and by default, you will be prompted to copy the clipboard changes into TextAloud. Use the Clipboard Options panel to control when TextAloud displays the prompt. For example, you can configure the prompt to display only if the amount of text on the clipboard exceeds a minimum size.