Balabolka Portable

Balabolka Portable is a text-to-speech (TTS) software application. All computer voices installed on your system are accessible to the app. The on-screen text can be saved in WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG, or WMA formats. The program can read the clipboard content, see text from documents, change font and background colors, and control reading via the system tray or global hotkeys. It supports the following text file formats: AZW, AZW3, CHM, DjVu, DOC, DOCX, EML, EPUB, FB2, FB3, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODP, ODS, ODT, PDB, PRC, PDF, PPT, PPTX, RTF, TCR, WPD, XLS, and XLSX.

The application makes use of various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI), which allows us to change the parameters of a voice, such as its rate and pitch. The user can use a custom substitution list to increase the quality of the voice's articulation. This tool is handy for changing the spelling of words. The guidelines for correcting pronunciation make use of regular expression syntax.

The converter can save the synced text as external LRC files or as MP3 tags within audio files. When an audio file is played on a computer or a modern digital audio player, the text is shown in real-time.

Also available: Balabolka 2.15.0.869

Balabolka's FAQ

Q. What is SAPI?
The Speech API (SAPI) is an application programming interface created by Microsoft to enable speech synthesis within Windows programs. The SAPI serves as a high-level interface between applications and speech engines. Text-to-speech software converts text strings and files into spoken audio using synthetic voices.

Q. What is Google Text-to-Speech?
Google Translate includes a "Listen" button that turns text to speech. After selecting this button, a browser begins downloading the MP3 file. The service can transform texts that are less than 100 symbols long into speech. It allows us to separate the large text into smaller sections, make audio files for each component, and then combine them (WAV, MP3, and OGG formats are supported).

Q. How can I install Balabolka silently?
A quiet installation allows you to install the program in silent mode without any dialogs. Silent installation is possible by using the -silent command-line switch.

Q. I open a DjVu file, but the application does not display any text. What's wrong?
The DjVu format was created to hold scanned documents. A DjVu file contains images of pages from books, magazines, and other publications. Additionally, DjVu can have an OCR text layer. It can only extract data from the text layer of DjVu. If such a layer is not available, the only option to obtain the text is to employ a text recognition system (such as FineReader).

Q. How may each line of a text file be transformed into a separate audio file?
You may add two empty lines after each line of content in the document. Open the file in Balabolka Portable, select the main menu item "Edit | Replace", enter ^p in the Find what box and ^p^p^p in the Replace with box, and click the Replace All button. Choose "File | Split and Convert to Audio Files" from the main menu, then select "by two empty lines in succession" as the split technique and click the Split and Convert button.

Q. What is a Spritz-Reader?
Spritz is a novel speed-reading technique. It enables reading speeds ranging from 100 to 1000 words per minute. The majority of the time spent reading is spent moving your eyes from word to word and phrase to sentence. Spritz arranges words on a display so that you may recognize them without shifting your eyes.