[LMB] Speech engines to read ebooks (was DI at Blackstone)

[Patricia A. Swan]

At 01:26 PM 1/1/2008, Meg Justus wrote:
>Thanks, Burton.  Not exactly what I had in mind (I'm spoiled by 
>professional
>ebook readers, and I suspect computer-generated speech would be 
>worse than
>nothing in this circumstance), but thanks.
>
>Megaera
>getting ready to cook a New Year's turkey since circumstances 
>prevented both
>a Thanksgiving and an xmas version this year

There's a speech engine supplement to Microsoft Reader that 
doesn't totally suck and is reasonably adjustable. Professional 
human readers are much nicer, but I've used this add-on to 
proofread ebooks I've coded (I can knit while I listen and skim 
the pages as it reads), and it's not totally bad sounding.  It's 
from L&H (I can't spell the names for love or money off the top 
of my head, but they are the folks who bought Dragon).  Not as 
spiffy as Henter-Joyce's JAWS, and no where near what 
Kersweil(sp) Reader produces, but has acceptable quality. (One 
of my IT jobs was setting up and maintaining systems for 
visually handicapped workers).  There are also some freeware and 
shareware text-to-speech software packages that aren't too bad, 
but it's been a while since I've experimented with them, and 
they've got limitations in the formats that they will read.

Hope this helps someone,

Pat in North Carolina