This entry contains a podcast of my article, Hail to the Tag Web, Part 1: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, please allow me to introduce you to Sir delicious.
Instead of dictating the podcast myself, I used the built-in speech synthesis in Mac OS X to do the talking for me.
If your software can grok podcasts, it should show up automagically. Otherwise, download the podcast.
The speech synthesis engine is built into OS X but I bought an additional voice for the engine. The voice is called David, I bought him for $30 from Cepstral. David sounds a lot better than the free voices that come with OS X. I saved the voice synthesis of my article as an mp3 with a free program called TextToMP3 (Update: If you have any problems with TextToMP3, try Charles Kelley’s Applescripts instead).
Some observations:
The voice quality is good but not great. I imagine I could buy a much better voice for $100. Or I could buy a better engine than the free engine that comes with OS X. Or I could just wait a few years for the technology to advance.
My article is filled with hyperlinks. There is no good way to communicate that in a synthesized podcast. And there is no way to embed hyperlinks in a podcast.
I massaged the article so David could read it more accurately. For example, I changed “HTML” to “H T M L” and I removed all the hyperlinks and markup.
I am anthropomorphizing David. I write about him like he is a real person.
Voice synthesis is a cool tool but we haven’t found the killer app yet.
This was a nice experiment but I don’t expect anyone to start using speech synthesis for podcasting until the voices get better.
A few weeks ago I lost my voice but I still wanted to make some phone calls. So I jacked David into Skype and he did the talking for me. I used SpeakerFone to write text into David and Soundflower to jack the voice synthesis into Skype. It was cool to call people and have an interactive conversation with them using David.
re the voice quality: I am not sure that waiting for more advances it very much worth while. A few months ago, when the video of Steve Jobs of the first keynote showing the first Mac ( http://www.industrial-technology-and-witchcraft.de/index.php/ITW/14100/ ), that Mac used some speech synthesis for the show- it sounds identicle to the built-in speech synthesis we have today in OSX. I was actually rathar suprised to see it, but it does lower the expectations about advances in the field (espcially if you compare how graphics and computing in general have advanced since).
Check out the following Synthesized Podcasts for your Zune and iPod using SAPI http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/07/09/3791178.aspx for a example of doing similar on Windows machines.
i think that it has gone a long way since 2005… Anne sounds ok.