by Liana Lehua
Time is such a valuable commodity. How would you like to optimize your time by launching your iPod and having your work, school or other documents read to you on your iPhone while you purchase an Apple iPhone Bluetooth Headset online, query for directions to your lunch meeting in Maps, and email your latest sales figures to your boss?
Big props to Andy Ihnatko, Apple Phone Show Guest Host, for this awesome tip that works on both Mac and Windows platforms. Mac users will benefit from an on-board app called Automator, while Windows users will need to purchase a third-party software like TextAloud2 ($29.95). The voices provided to read your text to you may sound too much like a computer. There are alternate voice options covered later.
SETUP - MAC
1. Make sure the document you want to use is converted to plain text and that your document is saved with the .txt extension.
1. Open Automator.
2. Add an action by searching for and dragging “Get Contents of TextEdit Document” from the menu on the left to the blank box on the right.
3. Add action: “Text To Audio File” and complete the fields: System Voice, Save As, and Where.
4. Add action: “Rename Finder Items (Make Finder Item Names Sequential)”. In the first drop down box, select “Make Sequential”. Select “Add number to existing name”. Place number “after name”, and separated by “dash”
5. Add action: “Import Audio File”. Select “AAC Encoder” and check the “Delete source files after encoding.”
6. Save the Automator workflow as “Text to Speech”. Go to File - Save as plug-in, and select Script Menu to save.
Now you are finished with Automator and only have a few more steps to complete. Continuing with the process:
7. Open the document in TextEdit.
8. If needed, make any modifications to the text at this time.
9. Select the Scripts menu located in your menu bar. It looks like a scroll or curly “S” and choose the “Text to Speech” workflow.
You will see the status of the conversion at work in your menu bar. When it’s complete, an audio file will automatically be added to your library in iTunes.
SETUP - WINDOWS
1. Download and install TextAloud2.
2. Open the TextAloud2 program.
3. Go to File - Open and select the file you want to convert to audio. You can change the file name that appears in the Title field if you choose. Remember where you save this file as you will need to navigate to it later.
4. Click the Speak To File button.
5. Choose where you would like to save the new audio file, and select OK to start the process. Wait for the process to complete.
6. When the process is complete, drag the audio file into your iTunes library.
NOTE: I did not test the Windows setup. There may be some slight variations between these instructions and your actual experience.
VOICES
If you would like a more natural sounding voice to read your documents to you, AbleReader is an alternative that is both Mac and Windows compatible and uses “AT&T Natural Voices” (16kHz audio). The female voice, Crystal, is a bit more smooth than her counterpart, Mike. Mac pricing is $49.95 for the downloaded version. Windows pricing begins at $35 for the downloaded version and offers additional add-ons, including the option to use “AT&T Natural Voices” with TextAloud. For Intel Mac users, you can save your money and use Automator. AbleReader doesn’t work on Intel-based Macs.
Not being a fan of printing things out and carrying paper, this has been a time and tree saver. I have used this method to convert text from several web pages and articles so I can have them available to listen to as I have time.
There’s also Festival at http://festvox.org/festival/ that’s done by the University of Edinburgh, and it’s smaller offspring Flite at http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/ hosted by Carnegie Mellon University.
Visually impaired people like me will definitely benefit from this. I used to cut and paste into Orator to do this. One step is nice. However, is there a way to speed up the voice?
Just wanted to let ya know, the Windows software works great! Thanks for pointing me in this direction. I had several students asking me if this was a possible solution for them, in their busy lives!
Heck, I will probably include this as part of my presentation on podcasting in supply chain education at the CSCMP Educators Conference.
There’s also Cepstral.com or you could just wait for Leopard to come out and use the Alex voice (as good as any out there with the limitation of being an American male voice whereas Cepstral’s are much wider in variety). No affiliations, interest, yada yada.
Well, when I installed Textaloud it sounded really robotic, but then it turned out its developer offers a great variety of human sounding voices for use with this program. I’ve acquired some of these premium voices, and now Textaloud sounds like a real person! What I like most about this program is it can read aloud from all the applications I use in my work. Another nice feature is it can change voices on the fly, which helps me avoid listening fatigue on lengthy texts. And of course I can now convert my reading to mp3 and take it along on my daily commute. Textaloud seems to have tons of operation modes and configurable parameters, so it looks more like a real text-to-speech centre than just an application. In my opinion, it’s a great program.
just wanted to say, that TextAloud is one of my favourite apps. I’m commuting every day and I decided, that I should make good use of that time. So I decided to listen to news (mostly sports and IT) from the web (i create text files with Save Selected Text extension for Firefox - link below). Firstly the voice sounded a bit robotic, but now I am used to it, and to me it sounds like real radio.
And the link for Save Selected Text:
http://extensions.geckozone.org/SaveSelectedText
You can bulk upload all your needed docs to www.Scribd.com and they will be converted to spoken mp3s on the fly. Last I checked, it was a pleasant sounding British woman’s voice.
After I uploaded my Sci-Fi tale of P2P horrors called “Better Than Netflix or Blockbuster”, I took the Scribd mp3 to several music creation/collaboration sites such as JamGlue and Splice where my mp3 was remixed for some great results.
Have you heard of odiogo? the service is free.
Audiogo only looks free. There are no free things. You will virtually pay audiogo by listening to audio ads they inject. And when you buy things audiogo is touting, you will also pay their actual costs including web hosting, server maintenance, audio redistribution licenses, and the profit the they make on the service.
I used the Mac setup process that you described above and it worked wonderfully. I am using it now with a Cepstral voice (William), and while it sounds good, I have been unable to change the speaking rate — the speed of the reading — as I was when I was using the Apple voices. I go to the Speech menu in Preferences and change it there, but with the Cepstral voice it does not seem to translate in the AAC/MP3 file — its always the same speed, which is a bit fast. Any ideas on how to slow down the speaking rate of a Cepstral voice using the Mac setup you provided? Thanks. Again, it works with the Apple system voices, and the Cepstral voice even sounds slowed down when you test in the preferences menu, but the AAC file that the script produces does not reflect that.
Thanks for putting this together, you’ve saved me a lot of time not to mention that I’ll be able to have my document read by the time I get to work
Thanks
Chris
Another app does this well,
check it out…..
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/teech.html
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