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I have just downloaded the Arena and SCID vs PC GUI clients. Both seem wonderful and work seamlessly with most of the chess engines like Rybka and Stockfish. I can't wait to get started by analysing the chess games of the masters.

I also have a physical chess board, and would like to play out such games by having someone sound out the moves: for each move read out by the "voice-assistant", I would move the pawn or piece to the appropriate square. This help me with drilling the coordinates of the 64 squares down into bones and improve my chess visualization. Besides I am also quite a tactile learner.

Sure, I can read the moves and then move the relevant piece with my hand, but that seems too distracting to look back and forth between the board and the screen.

Having some sort of "extension" (just like in Firefox) to Arena or SCID vs PC that can read of the moves of a game recorded in PGN, one-by-one (which can be paused at the press of a key) could be immensely valuable. Does anyone here know of software that has this built in? Or possibly any hacks? (Other than having my dad read out the moves of course...haha.)

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  • If nobody suggests something simpler (I am surprised nobody has), you can try to put something together with text-to-speech library. For example: pypi.org/project/gTTS
    – Akavall
    Commented Sep 5, 2020 at 17:58
  • hgm.nubati.net/WBJAWS.html is winboard with JAWS speech. There was a chess program (Chenard by Don Cross?) which called it's move but didn't read PGNs. A good programmer could write a PGN viewer with speech and your other requirements.
    – Mike Jones
    Commented Jan 7, 2021 at 6:22

1 Answer 1

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Scid vs Pc offers Speak-out-moves. Assuming Version 4.21. (latest at the time of writing)

  • Go to Options Sounds
  • Under Move announcement, tick from the list what you want. For eg. Announce new moves will speak out loud the new moves on board.

For a basic installation, the Sounds folder must be chosen (on top of Move Announcement). For that, Scid offers a set of sound files. To download and call use it with Scid,

  • Go to support files
  • Choose and download sounds.tgz
  • Put it in your Scid vs Pc installation folder. For eg. C:/Scid vs Pc/lib.
  • Extract sounds.tgz file which contains sounds.tar. Extract sounds.tar that contains sounds folder.
  • In the Scid vs Pc gui, under Options Sounds Sounds Folder, choose C:/Scid vs Pc/lib/sounds.

Restart Scid vs Pc and you will be good to go.

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