There’s a new text-to-speech voice with Leopard that is really good:
- open the control panel
- open “speech”
- select “alex” as the voice
Now, this doesn’t work with Firefox, but it does with Safari. to use it:
- go to a webpage you want spoken (news pages work well).
- select the text you want read.
- go to the “safari” menu
- go to menu item “services”
- go near the bottom for sub menu item “speech”
- select “start speaking text”
It’s not perfect, but if you need to do something else and still catch up on blogs, news, whatever, it’s good enough that the point will get conveyed.
Hey I just tested the text to speech bundled in with microsoft. Is this inferior to those referenced in your post?
Well, Robert Risk, you could listen to the sample in the link I provided and see (I mean “hear”) for yourself. (I really don’t know what Microsoft’s text-to-speech sounds like)
http://www.radioentropy.com/attach/richattresponse.MP3
http://www.radioentropy.com/attach/sam2.MP3
this is a pretty sophisticated tts engine
http://www.radioentropy.com/attach/hil.MP3
http://www.radioentropy.com/attach/hillaryunplugged.MP3