What is the best now days? Post a link if possible.

{ google these } 

2nd Speech Center (personal favorite :)(has pronouncing modification abilities)(sap15)
NeoSpeech SAPI5 Voices
AT&T Natural Voices
Kurzweil 
SayVoice
Speakonia
TextAloud
Text2Go

naturalreaders (free)
http://www.naturalreaders.com/download.htm

Expressivo
http://www.expressivo.com/buy_now.html

ReadPlease 2000
http://www.readplease.com/

DSPEECH : (most recomended)
http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

NaturalReader
naturalreaders

Balabolka does lots of languages 
Balabolka

smartread only does English and Simplified Chinese 
smartread

Speak Clipboard (Open Source for Windowns XP)
Speak Clipboard

I'm still waiting for a breakthough in text to speech quality. I was duped into buying the AT@T voices and found them vastly inferior to LH Michelle and LH Michael from the Microsoft freeware, mainly because of the herky-jerky delivery when the words are strung together. If you just want online text read to you, Natural Voice Reader is free and adequate to the task. I think it provides the LH voices, or will tell you where to get them. If you want to burn mp3s of ebooks, search for 'Speak Aloud.' Unlike most of the other programs that convert text to mp3s, Speak Aloud doesn't require Gigabytes of hard drive space to do it.

http://www.loquendo.com/en/index.htm is pricey but the voices are very good.

Thanks.

I had already tried most of those. They all seem to have that jerky synth sound. The smoothest did seem to be loquendo, but I'm not sure I'm reading the pricing right. $600 for 30 minuts for one voice is a bit ridiculous. Or, it might be only $6.00 I cant tell by the way they have it shown.

Oh well, mabe in a few more years. As is, for now, I'll have to try to re synth some of the others and see if I can smooth them out a bit.

Yamaha made a voice engine for singing "VOCALOID" it is a very good product. not sure if you can do just speach.

Yeah, I know about that one and I don't know if it can be used for speach only. IIRC it need to be pluged into some type of keyboard or midi system. Most likely to get the pitch for the vocals. It's something I could use for my music but it's not high on the list right now.