Windows Phone 8 brings numerous enhancements to the TellMe service aka the speech engine behind Windows Phone. One area that has improved is voice dictation for email messages (as opposed to just text) and developers can also now incorporate STT/TTS into their apps directly, which is especially useful for things like Twitter or blogging apps.
Text-to-Speech by Morphsoft is a free, straightforward app: you hit a button, bark out your prose and let the TellMe service translate it into text. You can then easily select-all and copy the text into other applications. With the enhanced multi-tasking in Windows Phone 8, you can easily switch to your other app and paste the contents, saving a lot of keystrokes.
The app is especially useful for those apps on your phone that have not yet been updated for Windows Phone 8 or do not have voice capabilities.
There’s not too much else to say about the app: it’s simple, well designed, and free and it helps fill a gap between old and new Windows Phone apps. You can even select the voice choice under settings and there looks to be a non-ad-supported version in the works too.
Pick Text-to-Speech up here in the Store.
Windows Phone 8 devices only. See our other Windows Phone 8 app highlights here.
Reader comments
Put your voice to work using the free Text-to-Speech app for Windows Phone 8
Hmm.
Text to speech (TTS) is when you take text and the computer reads it to you. This is speech-to-text where you speak and it's converted to text.
I would like to see actual text-to-speech functionality in more apps (useful when driving or for the vision impaired or just as a background notification system).
It's actually both in this app but the app is called Text-to-Speech.
They really gotta add a saved/drafts section to the messages hub... I've always liked having that on my old phones
That's coming with an OS update.
Good, I've been missing that as well.
Why? Just send the message before the window leaves the task switcher, what's so hard about that?
Crash if the language is spanish!
Wish they add voice typing...
Crash in English as well.
No WP7 version? Well, if there's no WP7 version isn't it good, shouldn't Lumia 900 owners understand that they need to swap their devices for Lumia 920 and make sure they do it quick to ensure they can still change their Lumia 920 cool phones for Lumia 1000 before Christmas 2013 or they may risk very few upgrades to their 920's?