Hi Kevin,
On Apr 21, 2011, at 21:23, Kevin Gibbs wrote:
> What is the value of this service if you have Alex to read text. Is
> this the way we got the Leopard podcast on VO read in the voice of
> Alex?
>
The main reason that people want to use the service menu option for "Add to
iTunes as a Spoken Track", or other means of transforming text to a spoken
recording is to be able to listen to material when they don't have Alex around
to read text -- for example, if they want to create mp3 files of text that they
can transfer to an iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad for listening when they
are out and about, away from their computer. You can imagine quite a lot of
other uses: reviewing documents or notes for work or school while you are
commuting, creating a set of prompt notes with for when you have to give a
presentation, creating descriptive announcement clips for joining onto the
beginning of your podcast or music recordings, etc.
Another easy way to turn text into a recorded file is to use GhostReader from
Assistiveware. This software can be bought as an add-on bundled discount with
any Infovox iVox voice purchase for $10. It's meant for the general market as
a way to read documents, mail, and web pages with these voices (without
VoiceOver), but has some nice additional features, such as a menu option to
turn your selected text into an audio file that gets added to iTunes at the
speaking rate you're using for the app. There's an undocumented feature that
lets you switch voices in mid-text by embedding control sequences. The way the
voice/language switching works is by using the sequence:
\vce=speaker=newspeaker\
For example:
\vce=speaker=heather\I prefer to use English.
\vce=speaker=alice\Chacun à son goût.\vce=speaker=heather\
The first phrase is spoken in the U.S. English Heather voice, and the reply is
given in French by the French Alice voice. The command to switch voices again
follows Alice's reply, so the next text will be spoken in English. If you want
to read through a dialog with voices speaking multiple languages, this is
great. It only works in GhostReader, and only with Infovox voices of the same
quality (e.g., you can't mix the lower quality compressed versions of voices
that come with GhostReader, and work only in that app to read mail, documents,
and the web, with the higher quality versions of the same voice that you can
use system-wide, and which can be used with VoiceOver.
Two more options, which I'll paste in from an old post to the mac-access list
(from over two years ago, so Automator is easier to use now than in that
description).
<begin quote>
From: Esther
Subject: Re: Text to speech and mp3
Date: February 10, 2009
<in reply to a query about how to make an mp3 file of text to speech; the
sources listed here still work>
Here are two alternatives:
• Apple has a demo Automator workflow that converts text from your clipboard to
an audio clip in iTunes. You could download this and modify it to work with a
selected TextEdit file instead of the clipboard, and you could change the
setting from AAC encoding to mp3. The Apple URL is:
http://automator.us/leopard/examples/ex07/index.html
and you can get the workflow from the page's download link. It's actually
easier to check the components out under Automator. It's made up of 4 steps:
1. Get Contents from Clipboard
2. Text to Audio File
3. Import Audio Files
4. Add Songs to Playlist
You can hear these listed if you VO-right to the Workflow area of Automator,
interact, and VO-down arrow through the list once you've downloaded it.
To run this as is, download the workflow and open it. Select some text and
copy to clipboard with Command-C. Then do a Command-R to run the workflow. As
it stands, the workflow creates an AAC file called "Spoken Text" that it move
into your iTunes library. You can change the format to MP3 by interacting with
the "Import Audio Files" action of the Workflow and VO-right to the popup
button that specifies using the "AAC encoder" and setting this to "MP3 encoder".
There's a trick to getting text to speech to record this at a faster rate --
put the following characters at the beginning of the file:
[[rate 300]]
That's two left brackets (where left bracket is the key to the right of the "p"
key), the word "rate", a space, and a number which is the words per minute,
then two right brackets. In the example used above, the rate is 300 words per
minute.
What you really want to do is replace the "Get Contents from Clipboard" action
with "Get Contents of TextEdit Document", but this is a little more
complicated, since actions get added to the end of the workflow. You'd have to
first select the new action by
1. Navigating (VO-right) to the Actions Library, and selecting "Text" (press
"t")
2. Navigate (VO-right) to the Actions table and select "Get Contents of
TextEdit Document" (press "g")
3. Add this to the work flow (Interact with VO-Shift-Down arrow, Double-Click
with VO-Shift-Space, stop interacting with VO-Shift-Up arrow).
At this point the new action has been added to the end of the workflow, as
you'll find if you VO-right to the Workflow area and interact. Moving actions
up or down to reorder them in the workflow requires that you move your mouse
cursor to the header of each action and Control-click. You'll get menu options
to move up or down, or to disable or enable actions. So after double-clicking
to add "Get Contents of TextEdit Document" to the Workflow, you would
4. VO-right to the Workflow area, interact, navigate with arrow keys to the
"Get Contents of TextEdit Document" action and interact to move to its header.
Then, if you don't have your mouse cursor tracking your VoiceOver cursor you
would have to move it to your VO cursor with Command-Option-F5 so that you
could Control-click (press the control key and click your trackpad or mouse
key) to bring up the menu with option to move up. You'd move this action to
the top of the workflow and either delete or disable the "Get Contents from
Clipboard" action.
You can also save this as a plugin, so you can run this from a context menu
(e.g., select a text file and use VO-Shift-M to select the automator action).
I haven't been working with Automator for some time, so maybe someone else
could pick up this thread. There's probably a way to add a small file that
contains your speed preferences as a merger to the workflow.
Anyway, the advantage of pointing you to the Apple URL is that it will
immediately work.
• Second option is to try:
http://www.spokentext.net
You can upload or paste in a selection of text, specify a rate in words per
minute, and have them convert this into an mp3 file for you. The voice isn't
Alex, but it's fairly speedy.
<added comment: the spokentext.net site currently supports English, French, and
Spanish>
<end quote>
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
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