Fw: NYTimes.com: Hearing Text, Not Tunes, on Your MP3 Player

[Alex Snow]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Pattison" <srp at bigpond.net.au>
To: "Multiple recipients of NFBnet GUI-TALK Mailing List"
<gui-talk at NFBnet.org>
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2002 6:45 AM
Subject: Fwd: NYTimes.com: Hearing Text, Not Tunes, on Your MP3 Player


>
>
> From: Catherine Alfieri calfieri at ROCHESTER.RR.COM
> To: EASI at MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
>
> Resources for people who find reading difficult for different
> reasons...
>
> Hearing Text, Not Tunes, on Your MP3 Player
>
> May 2, 2002
>
> By DAVID POGUE
>
> TALKING computers are nothing new. Computers in sci-fi
> movies have been chatting away for years (think HAL in
> "2001"), the physicist Stephen Hawking uses a voice
> synthesizer to communicate, and the occasional nerd still
> thinks it's cute to record a computer-generated
> answering-machine greeting.
>
> Otherwise, though, computer speech has been thoroughly
> ignored by the average consumer - which seems odd,
> considering that every Macintosh and Windows PC comes with
> built-in software that reads back text. On the Mac, you can
> choose from 18 computerized voices (every conceivable
> variation of male, female and alien) to read back documents
> in Word, AppleWorks, America Online and other programs. In
> Windows, a utility program called Narrator can read aloud
> menus and dialog boxes.
>
> A quick search at www.downloads.com, furthermore, unearths
> dozens of free and shareware programs that mine the same
> territory. Some are specialized programs designed to
> pronounce each word as you type it, or to give voice to the
> typed exchanges in your instant-message chats. Most,
> though, are simply designed to read back text on the
> screen.
>
> For most people, the question is: Why? Sure, listening to
> documents read aloud sometimes helps you catch mistakes a
> traditional proofreading pass might miss. Blind computer
> users, children learning to read, and people learning
> English may benefit, too. Then, too, text-reading programs
> make it possible for you to "listen to articles on the Web
> while fixing your lunch," as one software company
> cheerfully puts it. Still, for mainstream consumers, these
> aren't what you would call desperately needed functions.
>
> But the winds of change are blowing in the field known as
> text-to-speech. New Windows programs with names like
> iSpeak, TextAloudMP3 and Text-to-Audio do more than simply
> read your text out loud: they can also turn it into the
> high-quality compact sound recordings known as MP3 files.
>
> Teenagers ignited the MP3 craze by converting their
> favorite pop-music CD's into MP3 files that play back on
> portable music players. What makes these new speech
> programs remarkable is that they open up the same kind of
> freedom to the over-20 set. They let you listen to your
> documents - e-mail, Web pages, reports, manuals, electronic
> books, or anything else you can type or download - as you
> commute, work out or work outside.
>
> Of course, commuters and joggers have been listening to
> Books on Tape for years, and companies like Audible.com
> create what you might call Books on MP3. These products are
> expensive, however, and your listening is restricted to
> other people's stuff.
>
> Using your PC to record your own material has a drawback,
> though: you won't be listening to the voice of a
> professional actor. (Listening to James Earl Jones read
> your e-mail to you would certainly be a rush, but might be
> out of your price range.) In fact, you won't even be
> listening to a human being. When you listen to the old
> Apple and Microsoft voices, "lifelike" isn't the adjective
> that springs to mind. In charitable moments, you might
> describe them as sounding like drunken Scandinavian robots.
> Fortunately, a white knight has emerged to rescue you from
> the prospect of listening to mechanical voices forever:
> AT&T, which has developed a set of new, vastly improved
> voices called Natural Voices. The inflection isn't always
> on track - they sometimes produce nonsensical line
> readings, as if an actor were auditioning with a script he
> didn't quite understand - but you would otherwise swear you
> were listening to a professional, blow-dried American
> newscaster. Only a few words betray a hint of what you'd
> call a PC accent.
>
> At the moment, the weakest MP3-enabled text reader is
> iSpeak, from Fonix ($70 at www.fonix.com). It's supposed to
> be able to read Microsoft Outlook 2000 e-mail messages
> "with the click of a mouse," read text "from any Web page"
> and "vocalize" words as you type. Unfortunately, all of
> this excitement takes place only within the iSpeak program
> window. Yes, it can read text from any Web page, if you
> copy and paste it into iSpeak first. A handy iSpeak menu
> does indeed appear in Outlook, but it just copies the
> current message back into the iSpeak window. Sure enough,
> the program can speak each word as you type it, provided
> you're typing into the iSpeak program itself.
>
> At this point, iSpeak is also the only program that doesn't
> capitalize on the AT&T Natural Voices (though it will soon;
> more on this topic in a moment). Instead, it uses Fonix's
> own voices, which are superior to the stock Microsoft and
> Apple voices but feature a lot of what voice teachers call
> glottal stops. You get the impression that the person doing
> the reading keeps thwacking his own Adam's apple.
>
> Text-to-Audio ($50 at premier
> -programming.com), on the
> other hand, shows tremendous promise. It's the only
> text-to-MP3 program that can import Microsoft Word files
> for conversion, not just plain text files. It even displays
> these files, formatting intact, and highlights the words as
> it reads. Text-to-Audio comes with an MP3 playing program,
> too, so you can double-check the resulting sound files
> before committing them to a music player.
>
> Unfortunately, Text-to-Audio has more eccentricities than
> Ross Perot. It can only recognize text files whose names
> end with ".tx," rather than the standard ".txt," which
> pretty much means you have to rename every file before you
> import it. More damaging, though, are the glitches that
> result when you choose one of those terrific AT&T voices.
> For some reason the program ignores periods, turning every
> document into a gigantic run-on sentence. It also treats
> apostrophes as spaces, pronouncing "don't" as "donn-tee"
> and "you'll" as "you L. L." Is there such thing as remedial
> reading classes for computers?
>
> The company blames the AT&T voices for these glitches and
> says an update is due this month. Yet TextAloud MP3
> (www.nextup.com, $25 with ordinary voices, or $51 with the
> AT&T voices), a rival program that can also use those
> voices, exhibits no such glitches. It's the undisputed
> winner in this three-way Sound Like a Human contest.
>
> Better yet, TextAloud offers a couple of extremely useful
> features that feel painfully absent in its competitors. For
> example, only TextAloud can speak the words in the windows
> of everyday programs like word processors, Web browsers and
> e-mail programs (you press predefined keystrokes to start
> and stop the talking). Furthermore, whenever you highlight
> text in any program and then press Ctrl+C, the program
> offers to sock that text away on its own internal
> clipboard. The idea is that as you cruise through e-mail
> messages, Web pages and other documents, you can build up a
> playlist that you can later listen to, or convert to MP3's
> en masse. The program exhibits a few bugs and misspellings,
> and it still can't import (for conversion to MP3) anything
> beyond plain text files or text you've copied, but it's
> nonetheless the program to beat.
>
> None of these MP3-capable text readers are especially
> user-friendly. The first time you fire one up, you're
> likely to stare blankly, having no hint how to begin.
> Furthermore, after you create a few MP3 files, finding them
> on your hard drive and getting them onto your portable MP3
> player is left up to you.
>
> The ultimate MP3 text reader would bypass this problem by
> loading its converted files directly onto the MP3 player.
> It would accept Word and PDF files, read text from within
> your favorite programs, and use AT&T's voices. As it turns
> out, all of this is precisely what Fonix says it will offer
> in iSpeak 3.0, scheduled for a June release. If the new
> program lives up to the company's promises, it should be a
> doozy.
>
> If you can't wait, TextAloud MP3 is a competent little
> talker whose ability to read aloud any open document makes
> it especially attractive. In any case, MP3-making text
> readers open a new world of times and places in which you
> can get work or "reading" done, made all the more pleasant
> to listen to by AT&T's new voices. It's hard to see a
> downside to technological advances like these - except,
> perhaps, all those out-of-work Norwegian robots.
>
> Regards Steve,
> mailto:srp at bigpond.net.au.
> MSN Messenger:  internetuser383 at hotmail.com.
>
>
>
>
> --
> This mailing list is sponsored by the National Federation of the Blind,
NFB.
> To view or search an archive of messages for this list, go to:
http://www.nfbnet.org
> For more information about the NFB, please call (410) 659-9314, point your
> internet browser to http://www.nfb.org or Telnet to nfbnet.org.
>