This is a tutorial on how to use the Jimlet text-to-speech converter. We’ll start from the point where the application is already downloaded. This is the downloaded file: jimlet-1.1.zip. It’s in my Downloads folder.

Right-click on this file and select “Extract All”. Windows Explorer suggests extracting it into a folder with the same name as the file: jimlet-1.1. Just accept that. Click “Extract”, and the extraction starts, and you’ll see this progress bar. Now we’re extracting into this folder. This is where our application will stay for now, but you can move it somewhere else later if you want — it will work the same. I’ll skip to the end of the extraction.

Now we’re done, and Windows Explorer opens the folder the app was extracted to. In this folder you can see the “jimlet.exe” file — this is the main application. Double-click it to run it. And now the main window is open.

To convert some files, we need to drag and drop them into this area. I have some text samples here. So I select four files, and I drag and drop them onto the application window. Here you can see the names and sizes of the input files. When you click “Convert”, the conversion process starts. The line of the file that’s currently being converted is highlighted. There’s also this running indicator showing that conversion is in progress. And again, it may take a little bit to convert each file.

Now the first file is converted.

This is the main application window, and this is where you drag and drop the files you want to convert. I already have several text samples here. I’ll select four files again and drag and drop them onto the main window. You can see the file name and size for each one.

Now we can go to the Settings tab. Here you have five female voices and five male voices. English is selected, which is fine. I’ll set the output format to MP3 here. Then I click “Save” to save my settings.

Now we go back to the “Convert” tab and start the conversion by clicking the “Convert” button. And now the conversion is running. The file that’s currently being converted is highlighted, and you can see this running indicator showing that conversion is in progress. It takes some time, but the output files will appear in the same folder as the original files. So we’ll see them here once they’re done. I’m doing this on my normal laptop, without a video card.

Now the first file is converted. You can see chapter02.mp3 appear in the file row in the main window, and you can also see chapter02.mp3 in the folder here. Double-click it to play the speech audio.

First, let’s take a look at what we just converted. This is the second chapter from The Wizard of Oz, “Meeting the Munchkins”. And now let’s listen to the result.

OK, let’s stop here. You can see that in the meantime the second file has been converted as well. And while the third one is being converted, I’ll show you another feature. There’s a Textbox tab for ad-hoc conversion. You can type any text here. Then you click “Play” and listen to it directly from here.

Now let’s go back to the Convert tab. Our last file is being converted. We’re almost done here. And now we’re done. This is our last file. Let’s listen to it for a moment as well. OK — I think we all already know this story.

So basically, this is the workflow. You select the files you want to convert, drag and drop them here, and click “Convert”.

Now we’re done with this conversion, so I’ll click “Clear” to clear the list and start another one.

The second way to open files is by clicking this “Open Files” button. The file dialog opens, and you can navigate to your files. Let’s go to the text samples folder again, then “multilingual”, and select a Spanish text fragment.

In Settings, I’ll switch the language to “Spanish”. And I’ll leave everything else the same as before — same voice, speed, and so on.

Now we go back to the conversion tab and click “Convert”. This is a small file, so it converts almost immediately. Let’s take a look at the text first.

This is Spanish text. It’s highlighted as errors because my language is still set to English in the editor, but that’s fine — let’s just play it.

OK, that sounds pretty good.

If you go to Settings, you can see the available languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Korean. You can also change the “Quality” parameter. Higher quality takes more time to generate. The maximum quality is 15, and by default it’s set to 5. Speed lets you control how fast or slow the speech is.

You can also change the output format. There are three options: WAV, MP3, and OGG. In my experiments, MP3 is about eight times smaller than OGG.

Another important tab is “Appearance”. Here you can change the theme, as well as the font size and window size, to match your preferences.

Let’s try changing the theme. I’ll set it to “Slate”. When you click “Save”, it tells you that the change will take effect after restarting the application. So I’m going to close it and open it again.

And now you can see the program looks different, with new colors. Slate is a dark theme. Let’s convert something else. This is a French example. I’ll copy and paste it into the text box. Then in Settings I’ll select the “French” language. Back to the Textbox tab, and click “Play”.

OK. And that’s basically it. All converted files are saved in this folder.

Thank you for downloading Jimlet, and enjoy using it!