How to use "Speak it"

The Speak it service at FriendsAbroad is very powerful and works on text in 10 languages (6 of our navigation languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese, and 4 others: Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish).

Now you can hear good pronunciation of any text in an authentic accent. Although the speech is computer generated you can scarcely believe it - it's so much better than any other "text to speech" system we've ever tried before.

Just think how useful it is to be able to practise your pronunciation on any text at all.

Hear how good this is in English or French or German . The Italian and Spanish voices sound great too.

We've designed the Speak it service to be as easy and fast to use as possible so to get the most out of this feature, please read the whole of this description and you can really improve your pronunciation.

If the following sections don't answer your questions, or if you have problems running Speak it, there's further help on the FAQs page.

Just type or cut and paste any length of text into the Speak it box:

...or highlight any text on the page, like this:

Then just press the Speak button and the language and media player will appear, like this:

Notice how the system works out the language automatically - it uses clever artificial intelligence software to do this. After a short delay you should hear the text read out through your computer speakers.

If your text is very long or you are on a slow Internet connection, the delay can be a bit longer. The Speak it computer is still thinking while the play/pause button looks like this:

When it starts speaking it changes to the pause button like this:

If you can't hear anything, it probably means you have your PC speakers on silent or with the volume turned down. Adjust your sound settings and then try again.

If during the speaking you decide you don't want to hear the text any more, simply click on the pause button, and if you want to hear the same text over again, click on the bright play button:

That's all there is to it! So powerful and yet so easy to use!

The system uses clever artificial intelligence software to determine which language the text is in. In our tests on phrases and short sentences composed from a single language this works correctly the vast majority of the time, and you then you hear your text read out in the right language.

It's not 100% perfect though - no AI software can be. In a few per cent of normal cases or when you enter text of mixed languages, the system can't decide which language and shows a dialog box asking you to choose the language:

Just pick the language you'd like to hear the text spoken in, hit OK, and Speak it will proceed.

In a very small number of cases the system thinks the text is in one language when in fact it is in a different language. This can happen for example for text in a language which borrows many words from another language.

If this happens to you, just pause Speak it using the pause button:

then select the language you really wanted from the pull down list:

and press the Speak button again. Your text will now be read out in the correct language.

We're sure you are going to love the Speak it service and find it helps you with your pronunciation.

Remember to use this service regularly you need to be a subscriber. Click on the button below if you would like to subscribe.

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