Text to Speech That Comes With Captions

How long a read can be

A script up to about five thousand characters comes back as one read, roughly five minutes of audio. Send something longer and it goes out in parts, each one read separately and then joined into a single file. Keep the direction line, the instruction you put before the script telling it how to read, identical across every part, or the joins land as one narrator changing character mid-sentence.

Picking a voice

There's no dropdown of voices to click through and no sample to preview first. Say what you want instead, warm and gentle, firm and mature, and the read gets matched to that description from the thirty voices on file. Ask for the same script again in a different voice and that's the whole revision: a new sentence, not a new upload.

Two voices in one file

Label two speakers in the script and Chat Octopus assigns each one its own voice, so a two-person dialogue comes back as one piece of audio instead of two takes you line up yourself afterward. A third speaker pushes past what one read can hold. The script goes out in passes of two speakers at a time, and those passes get merged after. Slower, but it works.

Getting the name right

There's no separate field for pronunciation. If a name keeps coming back wrong, respell it in the script the way it should sound, Xiomara as "See-oh-MAR-ah", and the read follows the spelling on the page rather than the one you had in mind.

Getting the file

The audio comes back as a WAV file. Alongside it, two caption files land automatically: SRT, the format most video editors and platforms expect for subtitles, and VTT, the version browsers use for web video, both timed at the word level for captions that pop one at a time and at the segment level for a standard subtitle track. You never ask for them separately.

Putting it under the footage

The audio is already sitting in the thread next to your other files, so laying it under a clip or burning the captions in is the next message, not a trip to another app. Ask for the voiceover under your footage, or the captions burned into the video, and it happens in the same conversation the read came from.