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10.4: Convert any web page to audio via Automator
Authored by: bigbold on May 12, '05 12:40:42PM

If you use a (free) service like RSS Digest (disclaimer: I own it), you can turn RSS feeds into plain text HTML which you could use with this action. Seems to work good. I got it to read the BBC News feed and all sounds good.

Which brings me to my second point.. it really doesn't sound /that/ good. I can't understand how anyone can listen to these horrible voices for more than a few minutes. It's not so much the sound, but it's very hard to maintain a train of thought when something is read with incorrect pronunciations and very poor intonation. You need to really concentrate to understand more than the odd sentence. It's horrible. I wish they'd focus on improving the voices :-(



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10.4: Convert any web page to audio via Automator
Authored by: mithras on May 12, '05 04:45:57PM

I use the text-to-speech engine to announce phone calls, upcoming appointments, etc., so I went ahead and bought one of the Cepstral Voices for Mac OS X ($30). Especially the David and Diane voices sound much better than the Apple voices.

Now if only Apple would go ahead and buy these voices!

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Listen To My iTunes Library (6500+ songs, iTunes 4 required)

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10.4: Convert any web page to audio via Automator
Authored by: bigbold on May 14, '05 06:55:15PM

Oooh, thanks for linking to that. I'm quite impressed, and am downloading the David sample voice pack now :)



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