The TTS (text to speech) technology was brought up to help the educational system by providing a way for students with reading difficulties to better understand words. Of course, besides the educational purpose, one can use the TTS tech for entertainment or facilitate the absorption of information. If you are looking for a program that can convert pieces of text to audio files, Text2Audio Free might be worth your attention.

First, Text2Audio requires no installation process, so no program-specific data will be written on your drive. Secondly, the application structure is based on a single panel sporting a large text canvas, three combo menus, and a conversion button. All of these together provide a swift way of customizing and converting any piece of text to an audio file.

In order to create an audio file out on any text fragment, one has to paste the words in. Once the canvas is filled, you can proceed to choose the output language. The language list is pretty hefty, and no matter the text used, the application will try to port it with as much fidelity as possible.

The next dropdown menu takes care of the output format. Even if the section is titled as Codec, there are no other choices to be made from there except picking one of the five available formats (MP3, WAV, OGG, AAC, CAF). As for the final menu — inaccurately called Format — this has a rich list of quality levels. Starting from the first, 8bit mono, which represents the lowest quality and going up to ulaw 44kz stereo, the highest one.

To summarize, Text2Audio Free is a great way of converting any text to speech, but the biggest downside to it is the 300-character limit which seems kind of low for virtually any task. However, there is a way of expanding that limit to 1400 characters, but that includes paying a small fee.