Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Using text-to-speech to listen to online books

An even better way to learn from online books – if you are an audio learner like me – is to have them read to you. I just bought the high-quality AT&T Natural Voices for $35 (including a Windows program that lets you paste in text to read). And I've heard that Mac OSX Leopard has a pretty good built-in voice called Alex.

Here's an MP3 excerpt from Teach What You Know: A Practical Leader's Guide to Knowledge Transfer Using Peer Mentoring. The text is from the O'Reilly online book (shown in my previous post); it's being read aloud by AT&T Natural Voices.

The voice is easy to understand, and the information sinks into my brain easily. I like this way of learning.

4 Comments:

  • I have been toying with this for years (since DECtalk) and you are right...that ATT voices are great! Time for me to get serious about this.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1/27/2008 10:26 p.m.  

  • Hi Anon - Yeah, it sounds great. And the price is alright.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 1/28/2008 7:54 p.m.  

  • Great idea ! I must admit I tried to do that some months ago, mainly to use a simple MP3 player or mobile to read big and heavy books, but at the time, this was not successful. Thanks for inspiring me again :-)

    By Blogger Julien, at 6/01/2008 2:42 a.m.  

  • Hi Julien - Always good to be inspired!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 6/01/2008 4:38 p.m.  

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