Orato 2.5

Orato is a text-to-speech tool that can read out loud any text in English. It allows you to play, pause or stop the reading of the text at any moment. It can be configured either to start reading a text automatically as soon as you copy it into your clipboard, or to wait until you press the play button. Additionally, it may hide or show the text, and highlight the word or sentence in the text that is being read.

The program's main window includes the play, pause, and stop buttons, and gives you access to the program’s configuration options. These will allow you to set the program’s automatic reading feature – which makes Orato to start reading as soon as new text is copied into the clipboard – and to show or hide the text the program will be reading. If you select to show that text, you can also tell the program to highlight either the current word or the current sentence. Besides, you are allowed to configure the text font, including its size, font color, and background color. Once configured, you can start moving texts into your clipboard and listening to the program reading them out loud for you.

There are many situations where having your texts read out loud (e.g., e-mails) may be very useful. However, the program’s synthetic voice sounds very artificial. In addition, the program appears to be a bit unstable, as it hanged a couple of times while I was testing it, especially when stopping the reading after pausing it. Finally, it is important to note that English is the only language supported.