Get foreign-language text read to you online for free

This lady reads Russian to me. There is some major heavenly body action going on in the sky behind her.

When I signed up for CorrectMyText, I must have said I was studying Russian, because here's the message I got from them today:

Вы получили сообщение от Катрина со следующим содержанием:

I studied a year of Russian back in high school, but the only word I could remember was the first one, вы, which means "you". A couple of free online dictionaries quickly got me this translation:

You have received a message from Katrina with the following contents:

Knowing what it meant was a good start, but I also wanted to hear what it sounded like; although I can read the letters, I have no idea how close my imagined pronunciation is with the actual pronunciation (ultimate result: not so close). Without a Russian speaker anywhere nearby, and without feeling like spending the time to find one online willing to humor me via Skype, I googled about for a text-to-speech solution online, and quickly found one.

Read more... What I found was Smartlink's text-to-speech website.

The Russian sounded fine to me, but I really have no idea, so to see how good these voices were I checked out the English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, and I have to say they are pretty darn good. In addition to those langauges, French, German, Italian, and Korean are also available. They even come with computer-animated speakers, one of whom (one of which?) is pictured above. They are a wee bit creepy, especially when they're moving, but that doesn't take away from the pretty impressive text-to-speech.

Another very cool feature is that they change the color of the text next to the animated image as the text is being read—kind of like language-learning karaoke.

All in all, a pretty cool tool for when you need a sentence or two pronounced for you on the fly.