Box.net has added iSpeech to its OpenBox platform, which lets users get integrated text-to-speech conversion on any text document they have stored on the service. Users simply have to add it to their list of used OpenBox services and it becomes a part of Box.net's contextual menus, meaning you only need to right click on the document and choose the text-to-speech option to get it going.
You do have to be separately signed up with iSpeech to get this to work. It's not a free service when it comes to processing full length documents. There is, however a free tier of service that gives you 250 words per conversion, which amounts to a couple of paragraphs. If you feel like converting your doctoral thesis you'll need one of the service's premium plans.
While neat, I think a far more useful add-on to Box, or any other storage provider would be converting audio recordings into text documents. I've recently become hooked on this with my voicemail through Google Voice, and it would be great get a recording from an interview, or business meeting transcribed in the same place I'm storing it in the cloud.
A right click on any document file will let you convert it to speech using iSpeech. You have to be registered with that service to use it though.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Listening to MP3s of robotic voices reading stories from the Web is a good way to prepare for the eventual downfall of mankind at the hands of our robotic overlords. If you're into that kind of thing, Hearwho will do all the heavy lifting for you by converting any text you feed it into a downloadable MP3 file.
If you've spent hours amusing yourself playing with AT&T's text-to-speech demo, you'll be glad to know that Hearwho does away with the somewhat annoying 300-character limit. I dumped an entire 800-word story into the text box and had a playable MP3 file in around 15 minutes.
To speed up the process, you can either use less text or dial down the quality. There are four compression settings to crunch a file down to a proper size. You can also toggle between male and female speakers, and whether you want it spoken in English or Spanish.
One thing to note is that if you're doing this with blog posts, the blog you're grabbing the feed from might already have an audio-RSS feed that you can simply subscribe to. A good directory of these feeds can be found at Stitcher, which also has a really neat iPhone Web app.
Note: Hearwho's servers are pretty slammed right now. Your text might take a half hour or longer to get converted--which is abnormal.
[via Lifehacker and Techie Portal]
Here's a neat service for blog owners who want to add another layer of distribution for their content. It's called Odiogo, and it will take any written blog entries and turn them into spoken word. It uses an integrated player that sticks itself on top of every blog post, and lets readers listen to any post in lieu of reading.
I came across the service while reading a post on UNEASYsilence about hacking the new eeePCs to run a hacked version OS X Leopard (which apparently runs about as well as it can on the aged processor), and was treated to a 5-minute computer rendition of step-by-step terminal commands complete with detailed installation instructions. While a bit tedious to listen to after a minute or two (one of several reasons text-to-speech services are still not more widely adopted), Odiogo's digital voice is definitely a step up from the last generation of computer generated speakers.
To actually add the tool to your blog there are plug-ins and bits of JavaScript code site owners can integrate into their blog installation or hosted template. I installed in on a hosted WordPress tester blog in about two minutes and ran into no problems whatsoever. The service was also able to slurp up all 30 or so entries and convert them into spoken text in less than an hour from the time had originally I signed up for the service, which ain't too shabby.
Odiogo will take any text it can pick up from a blog post and crunch it down into spoken words you can listen to right on the blog, or pull down as a podcast to put on your PMP.
(Credit: Odiogo)Once installed, the service will go to work on all of your previously published posts and make new ones available for listening within a few hours. What's more, it'll syndicate all your posts into feeds that can be added to your RSS reader or whatever program you use to pull down podcasts for listening on the go. While it's certainly not as efficient as reading blog posts in Google Reader, you could use the service to listen to your favorite sites on a portable music player while out and about.
Despite its speed and simplicity, the service has a few quirks, not only in the speech department--which still suffers from inflection issues, but also the integrated Flash player. While it's super quick to load and can crunch relatively long posts into small files, there's no volume control slider, so be prepared to turn down your speakers or headphones if you've got your system's volume jacked up.
You can already find Odiogo integrated into several blogs including the aforementioned UNEASYsilence and The Jerusalem Post. To demo the service and find out more about how it works, you can also check out the site's demo page here. Also worth checking out is this handy plugin for Firefox called CLiCK, Speak, which will add text-to-speech on any site you're looking at.
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