DSpeech

If you're researching something and you need to do a lot of reading, you may lose your patience or get too tired after reading a huge amount of text. This is where a text-to-speech application will be most helpful, and an excellent choice is DSpeech. It comes with a good number of customization options, but the most important part is that it works without a hitch. You just input your text and the application will read it to you, and, of course, you can also speak into a microphone and DSpeech will write everything down.

The application is absolutely free, and you can use it on any modern Windows system, without encountering any compatibility issues. Its components are distributed in a ZIP archive, and you can just extract them directly and run the executable, without going through an installation process.

Once you start the application, you can start typing something on its user interface right away and click a button to hear a narrator read your text. It's that straightforward. Additionally, you can change the volume, speed and pitch through separate sliders, in the lower-right corner of the window. Alternatively, if you want to write something down, as you're working. Simply click a button and start speaking in your microphone and you will see the text showing up on the same interface.

The software comes with other useful controls, besides playing what you write or noting what you say. You can set it to read your text from a selected spot, create bookmarks and restore them and tweak the audio settings. Another useful feature is the possibility of inserting text automatically when you copy it to the clipboard. You can activate this feature with a single click, after which you will only need to select and copy a piece of text to hear it read aloud.

Reading and writing large amounts of text can be much simpler if you decide to use DSpeech.

Pros:
The software can read anything you write in English. It can also write everything you speak into a microphone. Text can be imported and read automatically when you copy it to the clipboard.

Cons:
The application may trigger false positives in some antivirus programs.