How to Edit using Text To Speech

Text to Speech

On Goodreads, a fellow author related their experience using Text to Speech (TTS) to edit their work. I didn’t do this for Resurgence but I decided to do it for Alliance, my second book.

Using TTS in Microsoft Word

Getting text to be read in Word is simple. Here are the steps to enable Text to Speech in MS Office Professional Plus 2016.

1. Go to Word’s Quick Access Toolbar by right clicking on the empty space of the access toolbar and selecting “Customize Quick Access Toolbar”:

2. Scroll down to the “Speak” tool under All Commands. Click “Add” to push it to the quick access toolbar:

To use the tool, simply highlight text in the document which will enable the Speak icon (it won't work if no text is selected). Click the icon. The voice will read what is highlighted.

The voice is a little robotic. With Windows 10, I had issues controlling “who” speaks. When I first listened to Alliance, I had a male voice for half the manuscript. Then after some Windows (or Word) update, the voice changed to a female voice. I googled until my fingers bled and tried various ways to change the voice back to the male voice (language preferences, narrator, rebooting…) and I cannot revert it back to the male voice in Word. I have no idea if the issue is Windows or Office. After wasting hours trying to get the male voice back, I gave up and just continued with the new voice.

Edit Your Text Using the Speak Tool

The Speak tool is not turning the document into an audio book. This is a good thing. Using TTS is meant to help edit a book. If the tool made it sound too much like an audio book, it would be easy to get lulled into listening to the story rather than trying to catch issues with the document, just like it’s easy to get into a story when reading it to yourself.

The first time I tried the tool, I selected an entire scene. It didn’t take long for me to simply select 2-3 paragraphs at a time since I was stopping at almost every paragraph to tweak something. I sometimes stopped at each sentence.

Here are the results of my TTS revision of Alliance:

• I cut over 12K words (from about 235K to 223K words)

• I noticed: missing words, repeated words, run on sentences, sentences that could be better written, punctuation issues.

For some reason, I found it easier to notice places I was repeating myself when I didn’t trust the reader to remember something. I also found it easier to notice superfluous information about time elapsing or distance details. That might have depended more my mood but listening to my manuscript might still have helped.

It takes longer to listen to a manuscript than read it. It took me 3 and a half weeks to go through the entire manuscript. But that time spent probably saved me 2 or more reads based on the kinds of mistakes I was finding.

I would close my eyes to listen. I wasn’t familiar with the text read out loud compared to how familiar I was with the written text. Our minds often fill in missing words without us realizing it. Something would catch my ear when there was a missing word. I noticed badly punctuated sentences, one sentence was actually missing the period.

If I modified a sentence, I would re-listen to the sentence, usually including the one before it or the whole paragraph. It’s amazing how often we insert mistakes when we change a sentence.

Take the Time to Use TTS to Edit

The tool is not perfect (it always pronounced “read” in present tense) but it’s a great way to edit a manuscript. It won’t catch spelling mistakes although I did catch a few from the way the word was pronounced. When I read it again, I’m more confident that the text will have less errors. Error free doesn’t really exist, not even for well known best-selling authors who have great editors. But the less errors there are, the better.

Listening to it has led me to question whether I should change how I write if I ever want to publish my books as audio books. How can a listener tell the difference between quoted dialogue and thoughts in italics? Before I answer that question, I’ll buy an audio book of something I own to find out for myself. But that’s something for later.

Has anyone else used Text to Speech to edit a manuscript? What did you think?