Good Text-to-Speech solution for Windows

Question

I am running Windows 7 and I know it has the ability to read me text in my applications, but I am looking for a good utility to save chunks of text as a wav file or mp3. It may already be built into the OS, but cleverly disguised. I know I can write a program to call the API, which is my next step if there isn't a good solution already.

I really like the quality of the AT&T system, but it has some pretty steep restrictions on using the produced MP3. I'd like to use them in my podcast.

Web based is OK too, as long as it easily produces a fairly unencumbered (Public domain or Creative Commons) Wav, MP3 or some other standard audio file. Naturally I prefer free or open source over commercial, but that isn't a requirement.

Answer 1

eSpeak is free & open source and offers everything you need.

It can run as a command line program to speak text from a file or from stdin.
A shared library version is also available.

* Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
* Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
* SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) is supported (not complete),
  and also HTML.
* Compact size. The program and its data, including many languages,
  totals about 1 Mbytes.
* Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front
  end for another speech synthesis engine.
* Potential for other languages. Several are included in varying stages
  of progress. Help from native speakers for these or other languages is
  welcomed.
* Development tools available for producing and tuning phoneme data.
* Written in C++.