Rehnuma Awaz is the Urdu text-to-speech engine that plugs into NVDA, TalkBack and VoiceOver. How it differs from a screen reader, and what a better Urdu voice changes.
Rehnuma Awaz is a natural-sounding Urdu text-to-speech engine, built in Pakistan for people who are blind or visually impaired. It gives the screen readers and apps they already use a clear Urdu voice that sounds human. It is free on Windows, Android, iPhone, iPad and Mac.
To see why that matters, it helps to know how text-to-speech differs from a screen reader, and what a better Urdu voice changes in someone's day.
Two programs, two jobs
People often use "screen reader" and "text-to-speech" as if they meant the same thing. They are two different programs that work as a pair.
A screen reader decides what to say. It tracks where you are on the screen, which button has focus, which message just arrived and which line of a document you are reading. It also lets you move around with the keyboard or with gestures. NVDA on Windows, TalkBack on Android and VoiceOver on Apple devices are screen readers.
A text-to-speech engine decides how it sounds. It takes the words the screen reader hands over and turns them into speech, choosing the pronunciation, the rhythm, the pauses and the voice.
Rehnuma Awaz is a text-to-speech engine. Your screen reader stays in charge of what to read, and Rehnuma Awaz gives it the Urdu voice to read with.
Why the voice matters
If you use a screen reader, you may listen to it for hours a day. Each mispronounced word costs you a moment of puzzling. When a voice reads "1,500" as a string of digits, or stalls on the English word in the middle of an Urdu sentence, you have to work out the meaning by ear, and simple tasks drag on.
For Urdu speakers, that was normal for years. Many blind and visually impaired Pakistanis switched their devices to English because the Urdu voices on offer were too robotic to bear or too inaccurate to trust.
We built Rehnuma Awaz to end that compromise.
What Rehnuma Awaz does differently
- Natural neural voices. Four Urdu voices, two male and two female, developed in Pakistan and comfortable to hear for hours.
- Correct Urdu pronunciation. A hand-checked dictionary of more than 18,000 words, and careful handling of numbers, dates, times, money and punctuation.
- Urdu and English in one flow. Rehnuma Awaz reads the English words inside Urdu sentences correctly and moves between the languages without a break.
- Attention to detail. When you type or move character by character, you hear the proper Urdu name of each letter, diacritic and Quranic mark.
Where you can use it
- Windows: as an add-on for the NVDA screen reader.
- Android: as a system voice for TalkBack and for other apps that read text aloud.
- iPhone, iPad and Mac: through the Rehnuma Awaz app on the App Store.
It is free on all of them.
Who is behind it
Centangle Interactive develops Rehnuma Awaz, with funding from Ignite National Technology Fund and the support of the Ministry of IT & Telecom, Government of Pakistan.
Hear it for yourself
A voice is easier to judge by ear than on paper. Listen to the voices, then download Rehnuma Awaz free for your device.
Hear the difference for yourself
Natural Urdu and English voices, free on Windows, Android, iPhone and Mac.