You now have the opportunity to listen to my feeds aka podcasts. You might think that I would manually record all my feeds but I don’t. Instead I use the great PodCaster service from ReadSpeaker. The service automatically creates an synthetic voice recording of my feeds, even better, it sound really good for being a synthetic voice I must say. I’m having the American female voice talking, sound amazing.
So, how do you listen to the podcast, get a program that downloads podcast. I use iTunes as I have a iPod. Here is bunch of programs to use for downloading podcast.
I believe that this kind of service is really amazing for people with accessibility problems. Hopefully many sites will use this service for their feeds. The quality of the voice is really great. It works for many languages, I’ve heard both Swedish, American English and British English and they are all impressive.
- Here is the link to my podcast feed.
So great thanks to ReadSpeaker / Phoneticom for letting me try out their fantastic service.
Indeed a nice service. Have listened to a bunch of feeds and I must agree with you ’bout the quality of the voice. Who knows, in a near future it might even be possible to listen to your voice!?
It is a rather interesting service. The text-to-speech service are indeed getting better and better. I came across an italian company, Loquendo, a few years back, who are focusing on sound and voice processing for professional services. Their solution sounds rather good too, and provides the option to direct the speech by introducing markers in the material to get the intonation right.
But, I agree it would be cool!
Have a look (or listen) at their demos: http://www.loquendo.com/en/demos/demo_tts.htm
Also try out the interactive demo, where you can enter your own phrases to be converted. Some 15 languages (incl. regional accents) are supported.
And Anders, they actually can develop your voice into a speech pack, but it will cost you dearly… The average Joe would have to work for a few years to get the money to afford it!
Thanks Martin for your reply. I must say that Loquendos quality was really nice. I liked that they had more a tone of voice than ReadSpeaker does, they are more static. Really interesting to listen to.
As long as you want your blog read in english there is always Talkr for free…
http://www.talkr.com/partners/index.html
Bengt, thanks for the link.