Balabolka

Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) software tool. All computer voices installed on your system are available to the software. The on-screen text can be saved as a WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG or WMA file.

The program can read the clipboard content, view text from documents, customize font and background color, control reading from the system tray or by the global hotkeys. It supports text file formats: AZW, AZW3, CHM, DjVu, DOC, DOCX, EML, EPUB, FB2, FB3, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODP, ODS, ODT, PDB, PRC, PDF, PPT, PPTX, RTF, TCR, WPD, XLS, XLSX.

The program uses various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI); it allows us to alter a voice's parameters, including rate and pitch. The user can apply a special substitution list to improve the quality of the voice's articulation. This feature is useful when you want to change the spelling of words. The rules for the pronunciation correction use the syntax of regular expressions.

The converter can save the synchronized text in external LRC files or in MP3 tags inside the audio files. When an audio file is played with players on a computer or on modern digital audio players, the text is displayed synchronously (in the same way, as lyrics for songs).

Balabolka FAQ

What is SAPI?
The Speech API (SAPI) is an application programming interface developed by Microsoft to allow the use of speech synthesis within Windows applications. The SAPI provides a high-level interface between an application and speech engines. Text-To-Speech software synthesizes text strings and files into spoken audio using synthetic voices.

What is Google Text-To-Speech?
In Google Translate you can find a "Listen" button that converts text to speech. After pressing this button a browser starts to download the MP3 file. The service supports converting to speech texts not longer than 100 symbols. It allows us to divide the big text into small parts, create an audio file for each part and merge them together (WAV, MP3 and OGG formats are supported).

How can I make a silent installation of Balabolka?
To install the program in silent mode without dialogs you may use a silent installation. Silent installation is available by using -silent command-line switch.

I open a DjVu file, but the program doesn't show any text. What is wrong?
DjVu format was designed to store scanned documents. A DjVu file contains images of pages for books, magazines, etc. Also, DjVu can contain an OCR text layer. It can extract data from a text layer of DjVu only. If such a layer is not available, the only way to get the text is to use a text recognition system (for example, FineReader).

How can every line of a text file be converted to a separate audio file?
You may add two empty lines after every line with text in the document. Open the file in Balabolka, choose the main menu item "Edit | Replace", type ^p in the Find what box and ^p^p^p in the Replace with box, click the Replace All button. Choose the main menu item "File | Split and Convert to Audio Files"; choose the split method "by two empty lines in succession" and click the Split and Convert button.

What is Spritz-Reader?
Spritz is a new speed-reading technology. It allows speeding reading rates anywhere from 100 to 1000 words per minute. The time-consuming part of usual reading lies mainly in the actual eye movements from word to word and sentence to sentence. Spritz positions words in a spot on a display where you can recognize the word, without moving your eyes.