Read the Words is a website that does just what it says, it reads the words. You can take any written text, whether a Word document or a website, upload it or give Read the Words the URL, and it will give you an MP3 of that text being read.
The reading is, admittedly, kind of clunky. I tried two different voices, and while the male (Michael) was better than the female (Allison) both sounded mechanical. The first voice I tried was Allison, and she seemed too fast. The site lets you slow down or increase up the speed of recordings to suit your taste.
One thing I noticed in the readings is that punctuation counts. If you’re going to use abbreviations, you need to make sure the periods are in the right places. Mr Smith is not said the same way as Mr. Smith. This can be confusing if the author of your document has been sloppy with their punctuation. It might also make a product like Dr Pepper sound funny since there is no period after the first R.
The readings are NOT hard to understand despite the mechanical tone. For students who have trouble reading large amounts of text, this could be a valuable tool. The site can also read French and Spanish in addition to English, but I’m not sure how well that would work. This is a neat and potentially very useful site.