Would you like to make a multisensory experience out of a comic book? Keep reading to know how!
From the need to read comics most simply and comfortably possible, Webtoon emerged in South Korea: a digital comic book format that stands out for being read in vertical format. The idea is people can read these graphic novels on a mobile phone. Therefore, Webtoon Comics don’t follow a page and panel design. They use what is known as an infinite scroll in which the reader can scroll down until they reach the end of the chapter. And it is not a minor fact that, although there’s no common criterion, each chapter is usually of considerable length.
Can you imagine? Infinite scrolling through your smartphone, fixing your sight on its screen and having your eyes absorb the harmful blue light? What a nightmare! Luckily, we can take a partial rest (because most of us enjoy watching the drawings, of course) and have the story read to us. How? The answer is simple: text to speech.
Text to speech or TTS is a technology capable of converting text-based materials into a human resembling audio. As a result, with this process named speech synthesis, any individual can decide whether they prefer to listen to their favourite content –books, documents, websites and blog posts, among others. Then why not comics or graphic novels?
Some might point at the images. But, nowadays, that’s not a problem. Technological developments have given us OCR: Optical Character Recognition or Optical Character Reader. This technology enables you to turn text-filled photographs and scans into machine-readable data. Thus, TTS may transform that information into an artificial human voice.
So one can have a text-to-speech to have Webtoon Comics read aloud. But it must enfold Optical Character Recognition. And if it encompasses realistic voices, the better. Consequently, we should find a cutting-edge AI voice generator with these features. Shall we?
Woord
Hear Webtoon Comics in 28 different languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Dutch, Norwegian, Korean, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Welsh, Bengali, Korean, etc. You can even enjoy them in regional accents. Hence, Woord offers 50 diverse voices across male, female and unisex speakers.
For starters, the software’s spokespeople are natural-sounding and high-quality. Nevertheless, Woord includes an SSML editor to improve the output’s intonation. To be more specific, you may tweak the tone to emphasise or whisper dialogues, add breaks and breaks to separate one vignette from the other, arrange a character’s phonemes or pronunciation and manage other audio aspects. Additionally, users can further(!) customise the speech synthesis by altering the pace of the outcome –that means to speed up or slow down the mouthpiece– and by selecting the best device profile (e.g. IVR, Smarthome and GPS, to name a few) for your comic’s reader.
Furthermore, Woord comes with other state-of-the-art functionalities making it a full-packed TTS tool: OCR technology, MP3 download, Chrome extension, etc. On that account, you can listen to Webtoon Comics in any of the following formats: pdf, txt, doc(x), pages, odt, ppt(x), ods, non-DRM epub, jpg, and png.
- Upload your comic as a file, share its URL or even get the Chrome extension or API access to not depend on the web-based platform for the text-to-speech conversion.
- Choose the desired attributes and customise the audio at will.
- Click on ‘Speak It’.
That’s all, folks! You can start listening to your Webtoon Comics via an AI TTS narrator.