Natural ReaderReviews 27

This software has some critical issues which require an awful lot of "prep" to your text, if you want it to sound natural when being read.

For example, if you have a clause that is separated by 2 M-dashes (fairly common in literature), the software does not give you any pause whatsoever. I had to turn all my M-dashes into semicolons to get a pause.

Then, if you are converting to MP3, there are two annoying problems:
(1) The software does not give you any pauses for a line-break (really?), so you have to add a period and a space at the end of every title, or bullet list item, or poem line, in order for it to read naturally.
(2) you can only make an MP3 with 20 pages or less, so forget about it if you are trying to read a gutenberg novel; this is simply too much work to be worth it.

It blows me away that you actually have to pay for this software, when you can turn a gutenberg novel into a computer-read audiobook on a mac for free. And without these annoying problems.

On the flip side, the voices are very nice, and so if you have a bunch of time to prep your text, then download small sections of novel, then join them together into a single file, sure, go for it. I was looking for something that was going to save me time, not eat up my time.

I used the trial version for a little while and all was good. I paid $100 for a month of the commercial version and used it for roughly 4 days. I haven't been able to access the site for the last two days. They told me it was either my firewall or virus protection causing the issue, but I cannot access it from a different computer in a different location or via my cell phone using data. I'm likely out $100 on this deal. Be warned before you decide to commit.

Well, I can't speak for the functionality of the full-blown downloadable version, but the online version doesn't even work (at least, not on my computer), so it doesn't instill much confidence for the downloadable version. I've tried it at least a couple dozen times over the past several days, and all I get is a lame-assed pop-up that says, "Something must have gone wrong." (DUH!) "Try again later." I've tried emailing the stupid company to tell them of the problem, and so far, I've not received a response, nor have they fixed the problem. I mean, come on, folks: It can't be that difficult to make a text-to-speech software that actually WORKS, can it? As it is, this thing's virtually useless, and therefore, utterly worthless.

1/ I have Natural Readers 15 Professional. It has what they call Conversation Control where you can insert a voice into a text. However the Conversation Control is for only one sentence at a time. Each sentence needs to have an individual voice Conversation Control inserted to it. It will not do a whole paragraph at a time - all with one voice and then the next paragraph with another voice. Some programs will allow for whole paragraph voice control but not this program.

2/ I had Natural Reader on one computer, but that computer was trashed (mother board kept crashing). I loaded Natural Reader onto another computer. When I go to Natural Reader's website to look at my account, I am not able to see my account as active. I asked NR why and they said I had it on two computers. I said that I only had it on one; that the original computer was trashed. They would not accept my explanation. So, I can no longer receive tech support or have an online presence with NR.