Trusting the Microsoft XP Control Panel/ Speech Properties/ Text to Speech Engine?

The operational program I use is Windows XP Professional.

In order to learn about the right English pronunciation of words I often use the Windows XP/ Control Panel/ Speech Properties/ Text to Speech Engine.

Many of the words I check are not found, for instance, in the electronic version of Oxford Dictionary, but the Microsoft XP TTS Engine pronounces them. Is the Microsoft TTS Engine reliable?

Trusting the Microsoft XP Control Panel/ Speech Properties/ Text to Speech Engine?husqvarna

Sometimes I use the tts engine to read out documents to me, for example when I can't be bothered reading it. That way I can do something else at the same time. But it's not always reliable. I often have to go and double-check (i.e. read) a sentence or word so that I can understand it because the tts engine pronounced it wrong.

Why don't you try some of these websites though:

http://www.soundsofenglish.org/pronuncia...

http://www.fonetiks.org/

http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation...

All of them have sound samples and some have the international phonetic alphabet symbols next to them, so you'll slowly start learning those symbols (even without trying too hard) and soon you'll be able to know how a word is pronounced just by looking at the phonetic transcription in a dictionary. This helped me a lot when I learned english and french and nowadays I speak english without an accent (I grew up in Germany) and I can nearly pronounce any french word I read (even if it's the first time I've come across it and I don't know what it means).

Good luck!!! =)