Auto-Audio Blogging With Alex
Photo by Flickr user The Rocketeer. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Just so you know, if you've got a Macintosh you can use the Text to Speech feature to either read someone else's posts or, even better, *proofread* your own!
Not that I'm positive it'll do *me* any good. I tend to write in the same cadences I speak, which is part of why, I think, I'm *so* inclined to terminally interminable run-on sentences. And since I write like I speak, hearing my posts spoken back to me may not help. But it *will* help with some of my less comprehensible sentences (which I also, unfortunately, tend to write the way I'd say them... minus the "um's," and "I mean's.")
Anyway, if you have OSX Leopard there's a new voice called Alex that's a *lot* better at pausing and taking breaths (if not *heavy* breaths) for punctuation. It's a big improvement over the earlier voices.
Windows machines have had the same basic behavior for years as well, I just didn't think to try it for proofreading before I made the switch.
(Tip of the hat to David Alison's Blog, an entirely work-safe and excellent source of Windows-to-Mac conversion tips.)
Update: See Zeborah's comment about the sample sentences Apple gives each voice to play with!!! Yikes! Good eye,Zeborah. I only tried that one voice and didn't even test that before I applied it.
I've had my text-to-speech set to Vicki for a long time. Normally it's little use to me -- I read *way* faster than I listen so it drives me batty to have to wait -- but it comes in handy when eg I've got the flu and my eyes are hurting.
So, I go to listen to Alex and get side-tracked into listening to the sample sentences spoken by the various characters. For the novelty ones, the sentence generally has something to do with the kind of voice:
Bad News: "The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of a fast approaching train."
Bahh: "Do not pull the wool over my eyes."
Trinoids: "We cannot communicate with these carbon units."
The male voices also have sentences expressing their personality or something about them:
Albert: "I have a frog in my throat. No, I mean a real frog!"
Alex: "Hi. I'm a new voice for Leopard."
Bruce: "I sure like being inside this fancy computer."
Fred: "I sure like being inside this fancy computer."
Junior: "My favourite food is pizza."
Ralph: "The sum of the [...] square of the hypotenuse."
And then there's the female ones, which, with the exception of Princess, have no personality and no care for anything except their owner:
Agnes: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Kathy: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Princess: "When I grow up, I'm going to be a scientist."
Vicki: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Victoria: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Fascinating.
[Holy moley, Zeborah. You want to post about that or should I? (I'll be out of contact almost all day tomorrow but that seems like an egregiously big deal!) --fl]
If you've got stuff to say about it, go ahead. It suits your blog better than mine, and Stuff on another forum has left me too tired to do more than list the basic state of things. (Fortunately(?) it speaks for itself...)
It's probably fair to point out that these voices have been created one or a few at a time over... oh, I can remember some going back ten years at least, I'm sure. Possibly the relevant software engineers have never sat down and played the test files one after another. Even so, someone(s) made some choice(s) at some point(s).
At some point when I have energy back, I might write a polite "did you notice?" email along with a suggested fix (that all voices have the same text - to facilitate comparing intonation etc) and see what happens.
[Thanks, Zeborah. I did! --fl]