Text to speech with natural voices: read any text aloud
Text to speech reads written text with a synthetic voice. For years the result sounded like a satnav. Today's neural voices breathe, pause and stress words the way a reader does, which changes what the tool is for. Aievalu offers English voices, American and British, and French ones, all on the same engine. Here is what a natural-sounding text reader is good for, what makes a voice sound right, and how to prepare your text so the first generation is the good one.
What a text reader is for
Voice-over is only one use. People have a report read to them on the commute, listen to a chapter to revise it, or proofread an article by ear: the ear catches the repetitions and the overlong sentences the eye skips. Readers with eye strain or dyslexia get direct access to text. Language learners hear a sentence pronounced properly instead of guessing from a phonetic transcription. When the goal is a narration for a video rather than reading a document, our page on the AI voice generator covers tone, use cases and the rules.
What makes an English voice sound natural
Three things give a reading away. Numbers first: "$1,250" must come out as "one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars", and "3/10" reads differently as a date or a fraction. Contractions next: a voice that says "do not" where you wrote "don't" sounds like a form letter. Punctuation last, because the voice uses it to breathe: a comma is a short pause, a full stop a clear one, a question mark a rising tone. Paul, the American preset, and Oliver and Jane, the British ones, handle these cases; the samples on the voices page read a date, an amount and a line of dialogue so you can check for yourself.
American or British?
The choice is not only about accent. Dates, some numbers and plenty of everyday words are said differently in London and in Chicago, and your audience notices. Pick the preset that matches the people you are talking to, and keep it for the whole project. For a bilingual document, generate each language with its own voice rather than forcing an English preset to read French. The languages answer in the FAQ lists exactly what is available today.
Preparing the text for the best result
Write numbers as digits unless you want a particular reading. Spell out in-house abbreviations nobody else knows. Put a full stop where you want silence, a comma for a short breath, and split any sentence over thirty words. Remove footnotes, page numbers and column headers pasted from a PDF: the voice would dutifully read them. Then read the text aloud yourself; whatever trips you up will trip the voice up.
Formats and limits
Each generation takes up to 1,500 characters, about a minute and a half of listening: a longer document is processed in successive passages, which lets you fix one paragraph without redoing everything. The file comes as mp3, the universal format, or as uncompressed wav for editing. Audio stays in your history for 90 days, and the text itself is not stored, only a technical fingerprint. Mp3 files carry a "synthetic voice" tag in their metadata, in line with European rules on AI-generated content.
What it costs
You pay per character, spaces and punctuation included; the counting method is explained in the FAQ. A thousand characters make roughly one minute of audio. The 100,000-character pack costs €9 and stays valid for twelve months, around a hundred minutes of reading; subscriptions start at €4.99 a month. The details are on the pricing page. The free trial, with no account, reads two sentences of your choice with the voice of your choice. If the goal is a video, a podcast or a training module, the voice-over for YouTube, voice-over for podcasts and voice-over for e-learning guides take it from here.