If you’re reading this it’s because, like me, you’re probably a History nerd. Well, maybe not, maybe you just want to know how to go about reading everything you’re supposed to study for a final, right? The truth is that even for those of us who adore the epic battles of the Romans or the voyages of explorers, studying is often a challenge due to the amount of precise data that we must remember. So today I want to tell you about a tool that is great to learn and fix great concepts for History Majors: Text-To-Speech converters.
What Are Text-To-Speech Converters?
Text-To-Speech or TTS is a class of software that transforms, as its name indicates, text to audio. Depending on the program the AI reproduces a more or less natural voice; that is, we can obtain as a result both metallic or robotic voices and extremely realistic tones.
It’s probably just a stereotype, but those of us in the humanities and social sciences aren’t usually the most tech-savvy. However, TTS are extremely simple and friendly software for any user. It is not necessary to have any type of experience with this type of software because, in general, you only have to select the file that you want to convert to audio and choose some options that the program will ask for. However, the reality is that there is an increasing supply of this kind of software. Therefore, here I will leave you my personal recommendation: Woord.
How To Use Woord‘s Text-To-Speech If You Are A History Majors?
It is quite simple, below I will leave you to step by step how to use this tool, but first some personal tips. In my case, I fix the information better in short and concrete fragments, so I usually write small summaries with information in which specific data such as dates and names are repeated several times, and I transform these small notes into audio notes instead of complete texts.
Now, to use Woord you just have to:
- For starters, you must have ready your file
- Then, choose the format of the file; some of the options you can choose from are pdf, txt, doc(x), pages, odt, and ppt(x). You can also write or transcribe it directly in the SSML editor.
- Next, select some audio settings: gender of the voice, the language of the voice, voice pace, and device profiles.
- To finish, press the button ‘speak it!’; the audio will be ready in a few seconds. You can listen to it before downloading and go back if it needs some more editing.
And that’s basically all. You can listen to these fragments while doing housework, going to the shops or traveling on public transport. Even if you are a hardcore student you can fall asleep listening to this data, although I don’t know if this is highly recommended haha.
If this helped you, check out these articles…
Use Text To Speech To Practice Presentations
Convert Your Files And Listen To Them With Text To Speech
Also published on Medium.