What is "text to speech"?

Inspired by a news post about ohlife I set up a small script that sends me an e-mail message each day asking me about my day. I just reply to that message with my daily journal if I have something interesting to say. This trick (or mind hack) works great for me because:

• I'm in a position to write my journal when I get the reminder to do it.
• My journals are collected in one folder with a simple filter rule.
• My e-mail is backed-up regularly so I don't have to worry about loosing my journal.
• My journal is portable (I can write it on my laptop, phone or in my webmail interface).

posted about 14 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

jilles de wit‭

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• Text to speech is an ability of some computing devices to run a special program that will "speak aloud" a given text to you. That is, they process the text, and generate the sounds that resembles a person speaking that text aloud using speech synthesis algorithm.

  A lot of different software supports text to speech; among them, Microsoft Reader as well as Kindle - at least the latter software running on Kindle 2d-gen or DX - here are instructions.

• The difference from an audio book is that the latter is just an audio file; a recording of an actual human reading the book aloud, not the program producing the sounds.

  Think of it as analogous to the difference between a video file from a movie depicting an actor doing things; and a computer game demo where a rendered video game character does those things on-screen.

• "text-to-speech: Enabled" means that the book supports the ability of supporting book reader to render its text into speech, both from technical and licensing perspective. In case of Kindle Amazon books, since the technical capability is always there (same format), it's merely a question of licensing - see discussions of this (somewhat controversial and unpopular) feature here and here.

posted almost 11 years ago

DVK‭

20 reputation 2 1 3 0