Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred and Deluxe Editions include a text to speech engine supplied by Elan Informatique. Text to speech is a technology where the computer converts text into speech using a computer-generated (and computer sounding) voice.
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| The text speech engine allows you to highlight the block of text and have the text read back to you in the computer voice. There are also a set of new commands which allow you to read back various sections of text by voice (for example "read paragraph"). |
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| The text to speak engine in Dragon NaturallySpeaking uses the British voice supplied by Elan Informatique. This gives the text to speech playback a sort of classy quality, but it does mean that some words are pronounced differently during text to speech playback than they would be by a standard American speaker. |
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| Text to speech requires somewhere between 8 and 10 megabytes of physical memory (although it will be swapped disk when not in use) so installing the text to speech option is optional. |
The quality of the text-to-speech technology included with Dragon NaturallySpeaking is not as good as available separately, at least in U.S. English. There is only one voice, and very little adjustment is possible. But it is integrated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and does provide an additional option for when you review your documents.
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| I personally do not use the text-to-speech feature but some people swear by it. |
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