[ Notes ]
Notes on speech, timing and subtitles.
Written while building the tool, so everything here is something the code actually does. RSS.
Free text to speech with no account: what "free" usually costs you
Most free text-to-speech tools are free in one sense and expensive in another — trial credits, forced attribution, a commercial-use ban, or your email address. Here is what to check before you build anything on one.
Read the guide →Text to speech with subtitles: the complete guide
How to turn written text into spoken audio and a matching subtitle file in one step — what the formats are, how the timings are produced, where the results are usually wrong, and what to check before you ship.
Read the guide →All notes · 14
A free text-to-speech app with no app store and no account
This tool installs straight from the browser, on a phone or a computer, with no store listing, no sign-up and no subscription screen. What installing gives you, and the one thing it doesn't.
Read →Text to speech from any Android app, using the share button
Select text anywhere on an Android phone, tap Share, and it lands in the text box ready to be spoken, with no copying and pasting. How it works, what happens to the text, and where it doesn't work.
Read →Can you use free text-to-speech audio commercially?
The question that gets asked last and should be asked first. Free tiers and commercial rights are separate things, and on several major platforms upgrading later does not fix what you already made.
Read →Free text to speech with no watermark: what gets added to "free" audio
Audio watermarks, spoken tags, forced title credits and inaudible markers are four different things, and only one of them is what people usually mean by the word.
Read →Character limits in free text to speech, and how to compare them honestly
Every free text-to-speech tool has a limit. The number matters far less than what it resets against — and a monthly allowance and a daily one of the same size behave nothing alike.
Read →Text to speech without signing up: why the account exists at all
An email address is a price, and knowing what it buys the other side tells you a lot about what a free tool is actually for. What you give up, and what you don't.
Read →