With the right tools, you can convert almost any text into a professional audio production that could rival the quality of top voice pros.

In this article, I show you how to convert your text articles (and ebooks) into great sounding audio products - in less than 5 minutes. Plus I'll provide examples of my own articles converted into audio.

The Proof

Before I bore you with the details, here are three examples of different voices reading a recent Tip of the Week I wrote.

Click the play icon in the player below to hear it play.

I don't know about you, but I am pretty impressed with the quality.

Best of all, it took less than a minute to create each file.

Text to Audio

To create the above audio files from text, I used the $29.95 Text Aloud program from NextUp.

Not only is the program affordable, it is easy to use.

To convert text to audio, simply start TextAloud, open the text file you want to read, or paste text into the text box, and click 'speak'.

That's it.

You can edit the text to improve the speaking quality - by adding commas where you want the speaker to pause, or even adding '...' when you want to change the inflection of a word.

With just a little trial and error, you can have your text sound as if were read aloud by a voice over professional.

The only problem

The only problem with Text Aloud is it only comes with computer sounding voices - not the kind you would want to use for commercial purposes.

But you can resolve this problem quickly by adding 'natural' voices - created by companies like AT&T and RealSpeak and NeoSpeak.

These 'natural' voices give your audio a very professional human quality, and give you the option to choose who the announcer on your audio clips will be.

For example, in the first audio clip I presented above, I used RealSpeak's Lee Australian English Male voice.

There are almost a hundred different voices you can choose from - and you can listen to samples of these voices at here.

To get started with natural voices, you have to purchase the the Natural Voices™ engine (which is bundled with the Mike and Crystal voices) first ($35).

After you have installed the Natural Voices engine, you can add as many voices as you like (at $35 each).

In my testing, I found I liked the ScanSoft RealSpeak voices the best. They are also the smallest files to download - at about 80meg per voice.

Other Uses After you install Text Aloud, you'll discover some interesting uses for it.

For example, you can use TextAloud as a web page reader. Go to any web page, and click the 'read aloud' button that Text Aloud adds to your browser, and you'll hear the page read to you - in the voice of your choice.

I'm also finding it quite useful to have TextAloud read back to me articles that I am writing - as a kind of audio proof reading.

When you hear your article spoken back to you, you can often catch typos, punctuation and sentence construction errors.

Some entrepreneurs are using Text Aloud to convert ebooks and public domain books into audio files which are then sold as 'audio books' on CD.

There are many other uses as well - including using it to create pod casts from articles on your web site.

Definitely an interesting and useful tool. Text Aloud

Here's an example of another one of my Tips of the Week converted using Text Aloud.