When comparing Neospeech vs Text Aloud, the Slant community recommends Text Aloud for most people. In the question“What is the best text to speech software for Windows?” Text Aloud is ranked 6th while Neospeech is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Text Aloud is:
Helpful staff, fast response for any questions regarding license, installation, and configuration.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro High quality voices
Neospeech voices are some of the most humanlike voices you'll hear among TTS voices. Their US English voices specifically include popular TTS voices Julie, Paul, and James are all distinct and pleasant to listen to. They sound even more natural when you adjust their speed and break of their text-speech input.
Pro Easy to use
Neospeech VT editor is compatible on most versions of windows and is simple in design and usability. The interface has all the functions of a basic TTS software right there on its toolbar.
Pro Excellent product support
Helpful staff, fast response for any questions regarding license, installation, and configuration.
Pro Many options for narration navigation
Most text to speech readers are sorely limited in options for navigating, this program has the most options I've seen so far for moving around while a text is being narrated.
Pro Tools for fine tuning output of narrated text or audio file
You can add tags to do things like add pauses, change the voice (like changing speakers for different characters), speed, pitch, volume etc.
Cons
Con Expensive
Licenses start at 1K per year.
Con Not intended for personal use
To license the software you have to contact their agents as though you are a commercial business. This is intended for commercial purposes, not for personal use.
Con Limited pricing options
The pricing of their software licensing is limited. You usually license their software on an annual basis or on an On-Demand basis with credits. The On-Demand option is great if you only need a specific amount of words to be synthesized into text-to-speech.
Con Program can only display plaintext
Images in documents or ebooks will not appear in this application. This means some types of image or figure/diagram heavy books or complex formatting will not be a good fit for reading with this application. It may require extensive text cleanup and massaging to get narration that makes sense depending on your imported source file.
Con Can't use mouse to navigate/seek track by clicking on text during narration
A user has to stop narration to use the mouse to jump/seek to a different line, word, or paragraph by clicking then activate command Speak From Cursor Aloud by menu or by shortcut. Only the menu buttons respond to the mouse when narration is running. Most options are grayed out until narration is stopped.
Con Hotkey options disappointing
Considering that the toolbars and application are very customizable in the toolbars, it was a big letdown to see how few options there are for hotkeys. Specifically, the navigation options should be hotkeyable as they do not have shortcuts by default. This means an over reliance on the menu and vision to use the application. This seems to fly in the face of accessibility for blind users or power users in general.