The benefits of using TTS for publishing presentations

A debate pops-up from time to time in different forums, about human voiceovers and TTS (text-to-speech). The most debated question is a variation of "what is best, TTS or human voiceover?". I think that this is the wrong question, a question that leads nowhere.

There is a more interesting question which is "what suits best the particular project at hand?"

Let's consider having a presentation to be published online, together with explanations and comments.

The benefits of human voiceovers are quite clear. A good voiceover sounds better and has more expressivity.

The benefits of text-to-speech are maybe less self-evident. I list them here, and I'll look into each of them in more details in separate posts:

• updating the TTS voiceover for a presentation, is as easy as editing text
• easier to create multilingual versions
• TTS is always available, 24/7, and it works quickly.
• easier to use different voices and characters

You can try out publishing a presentation using TTS on slidetalk.net, which is currently in beta test and completely free of charge.