Text-To-Speech Websites

For some reason, I can't see my own typos. I can read the same thing ten times, and each time miss the same mistake. This was probably a problem throughout my life, but has become particularly problematic recently as I've been writing for the Daily Herald. Sometimes I'll finish a story and read over it again and again trying to catch everything, but inevitably when I turn it in to my editor, he'll see things I missed.

If you ever suffer from a similar problem, you might be interested in these awesome Text-To-Speech websites. Using them you can get your stuff proof read. Or, if you're like one of my friends, you can put R. Kelly lyrics into them and enjoy hours of entertainment! (Seriously, it is cool.) Either way, text-to-speech websites are an underappreciated corner of the world wide web.

The best site I found was this one. Its strengths are that it works quickly, and it doesn't take you to a different page to listen to the speech. Visually, the page is kind of cluttered, but the voice was also one of the best/most natural sounding that I found, so I overlooked its weaknesses. Also, I used it yesterday to proof read some stuff I wrote for the Daily Herald and was impressed at just how advanced it was. When it read over addresses, for example, that were written out as "300 N 400 West" it actually said "north" instead of just "n." Also, when it read "$20" it said "twenty dollars," as opposed to "dollars twenty." That suprised me because it meant it was scanning ahead at least a little bit.

I also found this AT&T site. It has the advantage of being less cluttered, and it's run by a company with name recognition, but it also navigates away from the home page to read the text out loud (and uses a quicktime format for the audio).

There are many text-to-speech sites out there, but so far I haven't found any that are better than that first one. So, if you're like me and you enjoy catching writing problems and listening to funny voices read stuff, check them out.

(note: I didn't use one of these sites for this post, so it probably still has problems)