One Thing Well

Replacement for OS X’s built-in Speech services.

Features:

• Pause the audio
• Skip forward by sentences or paragraphs
• Replay sentences
• Progress Indicator
• Teleprompter Mode - Read along with audio

Via Brett Terpstra.

Sirius is an open end-to-end standalone speech and vision based intelligent personal assistant (IPA) service similar to Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Echo. Sirius implements the core functionalities of an IPA including speech recognition, image matching, natural language processing and a question-and-answer system.

Give the link of your article to Speaky and that’s it. It will extract the main content, detect the language, show you all the voices it can use and read it out to you using the built-in voice synthesizers in iOS 7.

You can also paste text into Speaky, or take advantage of its integration with Pocket.

App Store

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows

I use it in conjunction with µtimer to remind me to do stuff, in the style of Pester.