In this tutorial, I want to show you how to use the Jimlet Text-to-Speech Converter. It is a free program that runs completely on your computer and produces high-quality speech. This version is optimized for computers without dedicated video cards, so you can use your regular desktop or laptop to convert text to speech.

First of all, let’s download the program. We need to go to the website at https://jimlet.com. There is a single Download button, so it’s easy to find. You will be downloading a ZIP file of about 62 megabytes. I’m using the default Windows settings, so the file ends up in my Downloads folder. Let’s open it.

Here you can see a file called jimlet-0.4.zip. The number 0.4 is the program version.

You need to right-click on the ZIP file and select Extract All from the context menu. Windows will suggest a folder name to extract the files to. Just accept the default.

Now you can see that the folder jimlet-0.4 has been created, and the files are being extracted into this folder. This may take a little time, depending on how powerful your computer is.

Now we are inside the Downloads/jimlet-0.4 folder. The executable file is called jimlet.exe. Click on it to start the program.

The converter window opens. This window has three tabs: Convert, Settings, and About, and you can switch between them.

We will start with the Convert tab. Let’s move the window a bit to the right and find some text files to convert. I’ve provided some text samples. In the folder called text-samples, there are four chapters from the book The Wizard of Oz. Let’s open the first chapter to check it. As you can see, it’s plain text.

Now let’s select all four files at once and drag and drop them into the converter window. You can see the files appear in the table. At this point, you can see the file name and the size of each file.

Now let’s go to the Settings tab. Here we have the F1 voice selected. That stands for Female 1. The speech rate is set to 0.9, and the output format is set to .wav.

Now we’ll go back to the Convert tab and click the Convert button.

The conversion process starts. The row of the file that is currently being converted is highlighted, and you can see a spinning indicator showing that conversion is in progress.

The generated speech files are placed next to the original text files. You’ll find them in the same folder, but with extensions like .wav or .mp3.

Now we can see that the first file has been converted. The name of the output speech file is the same as the original text file, just with a .wav extension. Now the second file is being converted.

If you are working with longer texts, this process may take some time. In this case, the second chapter produces almost twelve minutes of speech output.

Let’s listen to the first generated file. Just double-click it to open it in the default media player.

Now we open the second file.

As you can see, the last file is now being converted.

And now the conversion is complete. As you can see, all files have been converted, and there are checkmarks in the first column for each of them.

Now let’s go to the Settings tab again and change some options. Let’s set the voice to M1, which stands for Male 1, and change the output format to .mp3.

Let’s go back to the Convert tab. There are two ways to add files for conversion. One way is what we did before, by dragging and dropping files directly from the file manager. Another option is to click the Open File button. This opens a file selection dialog where you can navigate to your text files. You can select one or several files this way, and they will appear in the conversion table as well.

Let’s check the Settings one more time. We have the male voice selected and the output format set to .mp3. Now let’s click Convert.

Now the MP3 file is ready. Let’s sort the files by name. The size of the WAV file is about 34 megabytes, while the MP3 file with the same generated speech is about 4 megabytes. This is because WAV is an uncompressed format, while MP3 is compressed, making it roughly eight times smaller.

So we have successfully completed our conversion. I hope you find this useful. And once again, all conversion is done entirely on your computer. There is no external service involved and no subscription fees.

To close the program, simply click the Close button in the top-right corner of the window. And that’s it.

And by the way, the voice you’re hearing in this video was created with Jimlet as well. I wrote this script and converted it to speech using the M3, or Male 3, voice, so you can think of this video as an extended real-world example of the converter in action. Thanks again for watching!