Vox Machina – Online Spoken Word to MP3 Audio Converter — Here is an interesting online computerized voice reading-machine worth playing with. I found it interesting mainly because it has some new voices rather than that same old crummy voice we’ve been hearing for 20-years. You know, the one that Stephen Hawking is now assoiciated with.
Now if anyone wants to help me implement this system with the blog, I’d be interested.
Vox Machina
Welcome to Vox Machina, the voice of the machine. Vox Machina is a web application that can convert your text input into a spoken word MP3 file. This conversion takes place on-the-fly using Apple’s Mac OS X speech synthesizer and the open-source LAME audio encoder. A Mac OS X desktop application is also freely available.
Looks like a Mac version of Speakonia
This is built into Mac OSX.
I guess it’s neat that it’s available right on the web, though. And to PC users.
Mac OS X? This was around before OS X. I don’t remember when but I dare say this has been around before OS 9. The voice names are the same ones in Mac OS.
Mac this, Mac that. The Amiga had this built in when I was just a kid.
My Newton does this but you can write in your own handwriting and it reads it aloud.
go to the chello voice and type in, na na na na na na na na na na
very cool result
Make the na na na longer and you’ll get the full melody. THEN try it using Bad News and a bunch of others. Deranged really is!
OK. John. check this site if you really want voice on your blog.
http://www.oddcast.com/home/
I know I had this (called MacinTalk at the time) on my Mac running System 7.5, so it’s at least that old.
You can give it parameters, too. Try preceeding your text with [[pbas 0]] to make the voice very deep, or [[bpas 70]] to make it high-pitched. This has a somewhat different effect on the sampled voices (Bruce, Victoria, Viki, Agnes) than on the synthesized voices (all the rest). There’s also pmod, which controls the pitch variation while speaking; some voices don’t respond much to it, but try putting [[pmod 100]] before your text and speaking it with Zarvox.
I remember that someone once wrote a program for the old Mac OS that used these and other parameters to make the computer sing songs. Not sure what happened to it, it was called “Sing!”, iirc.
In OS X, you can set it up to read text to you from any application. Go to the Text To Speech preferences pane and ckeck the “Speak selected text when the key is pressed” check box. Click “Set Key” beside it and enter a key combination, making sure it doesn’t conflict with anything else. Now you can select text in any application and press that key combination, and the text will be read to you. It’s pretty neat. It works with at least some X11 apps too, at least if you’re using Apple’s X11.
My suggestion: Make it run as a hidden application in a frame. That way you can link to an about.com article and send it to the guy in the next cube. when he opens the link all of a sudden the computer says. “I’m unhappy with the size of my penis.” And you can laugh and laugh in your geeky way while he tried to figure out how you did it.