George Koller on sat 3 jul 04
Hi Again,
I'm writing software these days for a project that is using
sound. Must have visited and downloaded 30 software
packages. Not sure where "Speech to Text" is BUT:
TEXT TO SPEECH
is here and is working just fine on your average horsepower
home/office PC these days.
For the blind this is some life changing stuff, one package just
reads all text near the cursor. It'll read ads and options with
equal diligence - but sighted people have to live with flashing
popups too - so that is useful.
Before I get to what I think is getting to be useful for many of
us let me mention that I came across a "real thinker" site at:
http://http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm
I think this is a lesson in "what art is" in it's own way. This is
for the blind. Basically a blind person can scan his surroundings
with a camera and software turns the visual image into a "sound
scape". Sounds like you are in a whale pod, must be what it is
like to be a Bat in a cave, or a deep ocean fish....... =20
For the rest of us sighted non-whales there is this: Your computer
can read your EMails while you are doing other things (!?)...... the
voices I installed were somewhere between the Ahhnold in Terminator
and pleasant and better ones are out there if you pay for a package.
After 3 days of looking at stuff I settled on a package called "natural
voice" , it's free or $69 or something for the highest end. I had to do
some rather tricky programming to put my financial news into the "system
clipboard" like you do when you Copy / or Cut text. Immediately this =
package
will read it and does an amazingly good / almost natural voice job of =
it.
I can easily see a way to take all Emails from certain sources, and have =
them
read to you while your hands are busy. Didn't pursue this because I =
have
more pressing things to get done.
There is also software that will "go out on the web" and fetch fresh =
data
from any site as text. Do you see the possibilities?
Best,
george koller
sturgeon bay, wi - door county
northport, mi - leelanau county
two great places separated by 100 miles of great lake.
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