TALKING computers are nothing new. Computers in sci-fi movies have been chatting away for years (think HAL in ''2001''), the physicist Stephen Hawking uses a voice synthesizer to communicate, and the occasional nerd still thinks it's cute to record a computer-generated answering-machine greeting.

Otherwise, though, computer speech has been thoroughly ignored by the average consumer -- which seems odd, considering that every Macintosh and Windows PC comes with built-in software that reads back text. On the Mac, you can choose from 18 computerized voices (every conceivable variation of male, female and alien) to read back documents in Word, AppleWorks, America Online and other programs. In Windows, a utility program called Narrator can read aloud menus and dialog boxes.

A quick search at, furthermore, unearths dozens of free and shareware programs that mine the same territory. Some are specialized programs designed to pronounce each word as you type it, or to give voice to the typed exchanges in your instant-message chats. Most, though, are simply designed to read back text on the screen.

For most people, the question is: Why? Sure, listening to documents read aloud sometimes helps you catch mistakes a traditional proofreading pass might miss. Blind computer users, children learning to read, and people learning English may benefit, too. Then, too, text-reading programs make it possible for you to ''listen to articles on the Web while fixing your lunch,'' as one software company cheerfully puts it. Still, for mainstream consumers, these aren't what you would call desperately needed functions.

But the winds of change are blowing in the field known as text-to-speech. New Windows programs with names like iSpeak, TextAloudMP3 and Text-to-Audio do more than simply read your text out loud: they can also turn it into the high-quality compact sound recordings known as MP3 files.

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Teenagers ignited the MP3 craze by converting their favorite pop-music CD's into MP3 files that play back on portable music players. What makes these new speech programs remarkable is that they open up the same kind of freedom to the over-20 set. They let you listen to your documents -- e-mail, Web pages, reports, manuals, electronic books, or anything else you can type or download -- as you commute, work out or work outside.

Of course, commuters and joggers have been listening to Books on Tape for years, and companies like create what you might call Books on MP3. These products are expensive, however, and your listening is restricted to other people's stuff.

Using your PC to record your own material has a drawback, though: you won't be listening to the voice of a professional actor. (Listening to James Earl Jones read your e-mail to you would certainly be a rush, but might be out of your price range.) In fact, you won't even be listening to a human being. When you listen to the old Apple and Microsoft voices, ''lifelike'' isn't the adjective that springs to mind. In charitable moments, you might describe them as sounding like drunken Scandinavian robots. Fortunately, a white knight has emerged to rescue you from the prospect of listening to mechanical voices forever: AT&T, which has developed a set of new, vastly improved voices called Natural Voices. The inflection isn't always on track -- they sometimes produce nonsensical line readings, as if an actor were auditioning with a script he didn't quite understand -- but you would otherwise swear you were listening to a professional, blow-dried American newscaster. Only a few words betray a hint of what you'd call a PC accent.

At the moment, the weakest MP3-enabled text reader is iSpeak, from Fonix ($70 at It's supposed to be able to read Microsoft Outlook 2000 e-mail messages ''with the click of a mouse,'' read text ''from any Web page'' and ''vocalize'' words as you type. Unfortunately, all of this excitement takes place only within the iSpeak program window. Yes, it can read text from any Web page, if you copy and paste it into iSpeak first. A handy iSpeak menu does indeed appear in Outlook, but it just copies the current message back into the iSpeak window. Sure enough, the program can speak each word as you type it, provided you're typing into the iSpeak program itself.

At this point, iSpeak is also the only program that doesn't capitalize on the AT&T Natural Voices (though it will soon; more on this topic in a moment). Instead, it uses Fonix's own voices, which are superior to the stock Microsoft and Apple voices but feature a lot of what voice teachers call glottal stops. You get the impression that the person doing the reading keeps thwacking his own Adam's apple.

Text-to-Audio ($50 at, on the other hand, shows tremendous promise. It's the only text-to-MP3 program that can import Microsoft Word files for conversion, not just plain text files. It even displays these files, formatting intact, and highlights the words as it reads. Text-to-Audio comes with an MP3 playing program, too, so you can double-check the resulting sound files before committing them to a music player.

Unfortunately, Text-to-Audio has more eccentricities than Ross Perot. It can only recognize text files whose names end with ''.tx,'' rather than the standard ''.txt,'' which pretty much means you have to rename every file before you import it. More damaging, though, are the glitches that result when you choose one of those terrific AT&T voices. For some reason the program ignores periods, turning every document into a gigantic run-on sentence. It also treats apostrophes as spaces, pronouncing ''don't'' as ''donn-tee'' and ''you'll'' as ''you L. L.'' Is there such thing as remedial reading classes for computers?

The company blames the AT&T voices for these glitches and says an update is due this month. Yet TextAloud MP3 (, $25 with ordinary voices, or $51 with the AT&T voices), a rival program that can also use those voices, exhibits no such glitches. It's the undisputed winner in this three-way Sound Like a Human contest.

Better yet, TextAloud offers a couple of extremely useful features that feel painfully absent in its competitors. For example, only TextAloud can speak the words in the windows of everyday programs like word processors, Web browsers and e-mail programs (you press predefined keystrokes to start and stop the talking). Furthermore, whenever you highlight text in any program and then press Ctrl+C, the program offers to sock that text away on its own internal clipboard. The idea is that as you cruise through e-mail messages, Web pages and other documents, you can build up a playlist that you can later listen to, or convert to MP3's en masse. The program exhibits a few bugs and misspellings, and it still can't import (for conversion to MP3) anything beyond plain text files or text you've copied, but it's nonetheless the program to beat.

None of these MP3-capable text readers are especially user-friendly. The first time you fire one up, you're likely to stare blankly, having no hint how to begin. Furthermore, after you create a few MP3 files, finding them on your hard drive and getting them onto your portable MP3 player is left up to you.

The ultimate MP3 text reader would bypass this problem by loading its converted files directly onto the MP3 player. It would accept Word and PDF files, read text from within your favorite programs, and use AT&T's voices. As it turns out, all of this is precisely what Fonix says it will offer in iSpeak 3.0, scheduled for a June release. If the new program lives up to the company's promises, it should be a doozy.

If you can't wait, TextAloud MP3 is a competent little talker whose ability to read aloud any open document makes it especially attractive. In any case, MP3-making text readers open a new world of times and places in which you can get work or ''reading'' done, made all the more pleasant to listen to by AT&T's new voices. It's hard to see a downside to technological advances like these -- except, perhaps, all those out-of-work Norwegian robots.

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