I decided to catch up with a few of the longer blog posts using the TTS audio approach mentioned in yesterday’s post while doing some mind numbing paperwork. One of them was causticTech’s version of an Industry Press Release. At first I thought, causticphil’s toning it down somewhat this time. Did the censor police catch up with him? Has he mellowed? Stopped drinking copious amounts of coffee/tea/? Nope… the text to speech software was converting each swear word to “beep” e.g. fucking company -> beep company, fucking consultants -> beep consultants. No way to turn the conversion off either. His prose just didn’t have the same effect…

A while back Chris Sell’s blog linked to a speech demo at Nuance Communications. I actually evaluated one of their products for a prospective job and it was pretty good. Unfortunately the project never eventuated, but it would be great to have a personal TTS app that used the Nuance text to speech technology.