voice to text

I'm dictating this now into NaturallySpeaking voice to text program that issupposed to be the best one there is.

I will make this short and sweet.

It works pretty good. I don't have the best microphone. My soundcard is pretty bad.


Had to give up and enter the text into the DragonPad as it's called, but that's all right if it means that you don't have to type it all, and yet get reasonably good typing accuracy, it might still work out pretty well.

With a better microphone and a better soundcard I should get much better accuracy in its recognition of what I'm saying.

I'm just fiddling around occupying idle time so, that's all for now, from Sue and NaturallySpeaking.

Anyone who of somewhere where i can get ( buy / download ) the resource for the flip side of the coin ?

Text to speech

I mean text to phonetic translation has been around since the old 8bit days, and phonetic to sound is a matter of pasting a load of sound clips together - so it must be possible with enough sound clips and a little string manipulation to produce a workable "talking" script in SL ( even if you have to change your typing to be phonetic )

Any leads would be appreciated.

Hi, sorry for the delay in responding.

The best one I have found so far is called TextAloud, by NextUp, at nextup.com

The prices are reasonable. There are several variations and different bundles. I made a file of TextAloud reading the forum guidelines, and posted it in another thread.

TextAloud will read a text file aloud, or make a wav or mp3 file. It has an Internet Explorer toolbar that should simplify the process of reading text on a web page.
I just now, just this minute, see on the nextup.com site that they now have a firefox browser plugin for their text to speech program.

IBM makes a text to speech oriented browser program that unfortunately works only with Internet Explorer, not Firefox or Opera, sigh. It's called Home Page reader, and the website for it is at http://www-306.ibm.com/able/solution_offerings/hpr.html .

There's a FireFox extension called FoxyVoice 0.1.1, which uses the Microsoft Speech API, which I am pretty sure won't sound very good. I don't think it claims to work with the latest version of Firefox, though, although it is sometimes possible to trick FireFox to use an extension that isn't supposed to work.

Oh yeah, the free Opera browser comes with text to speech ability as an option. It uses the IBM ViaVoice reader, and sounds pretty good.

There are different voices available for these systems, and which voice you use makes a tremendous difference in the quality of the output.

...

Just now once again came across coolspeech, at bytecool.com. Thirty bucks, and there's a free trial. They also have a program called TextSound which appears to be a text to voice file program, as opposed to reading things aloud.

----

Might try 123byte.com also.

----

Alive Text To Speech is another one. It is doing a nice job of reading the forums guidelines at the moment. The are at http://www.alivemedia.net/textspeech.htm.

The quoted portion of this post was done using speech recognition.



Incidentally, it was Torley's comment about his fingers cramping that spurred me to pursue my already existing interest in voice recognition and text to speech.

The NaturallySpeaking website and help files make the point that excessive use of voice recognition can damage one's voice, and says that people who are prone to repetitive stress problems are more likely to suffer voice problems from excess use of voice recognition for text entry.