Text to Speech in Word: Instructions

[kentagions]

1. Click to open the Quick Access Toolbar: It's a little icon in the upper left corner next to the circular Reload Page arrow. It is a dash above a down arrow.

A drop-down menu will, um...drop down.

2. In the Quick Access Toolbar drop-down menu, click More Commands.

3. In the Customize the Quick Access Toolbar field, open the menu that is reading Popular Commands with the drop-down arrow. Click on All Commands.

4. In the All Commands menu, scroll down and highlight Speak.

5. Between the two menus in the field, click Add>>.

Speak will appear in the Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu.

6. In the bar at the bottom of the field, click OK.

The Customize Quick Access Toolbar field will disappear and your Speak Selected Text icon will appear next to the Quick Access Toolbar icon. It is a little text bubble with a right-facing arrowhead.

7. Turn your speakers on, highlight text in your manuscript and click the Speak Selected Text icon. A computer voice will read your text.

Now you can teach your parrot anything. Have fun.

[morganb]

Thanks for the tutorial! Also, if you go into your computer's Text to Speech settings, you can customize the voice you want to hear. If you make changes though, I think you have to restart your computer before it becomes effective.


~Morgan

[orbivillein]

Other word processor software also includes text-to-speech applications, includes WordPerfect and Acrobat distiller apps, the Dragon, of course, supported by several browsers, too.

[AlexH]

I can't get Word to read any text.

There are websites that do it too, including: https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/

The voices sound so weird anyway, I don't find it helpful. I have a slightly sore throat from reading my own story out loud today.

[kentagions]

Just picked up Office 2019. Text to speech is easy to activate.

Right-Click on the Quick Access Toolbar icon.

From the drop-down menu, Click - Read Aloud.

An A icon with a sound wave will appear to the right of the Quick Access Toolbar icon. When you click on it, the computer voice will begin reading wherever the cursor is.

Enjoy,
Kent

[michaeljwyantjr]

Just a note for anyone else swinging by: Read Aloud doesn't look like it's on the Mac version of Office. That said, you can enable the built-in macOS text-to-speech feature pretty easily.

Here are the steps to do that:

* Open System Preferences
* Go to Accessibility
* Select "Speech" from the scroll bar on the left
* Check the box for "Speak selected text when the key is pressed"
* Note the keys you need to hit in order to enable this feature (or hit Change Key and set a different set of keys)
* Go back to Word and highlight the bit you want to have read to you
* Hit the Keys you set two steps ago