Web In Depth

Today I am going to look at a little web application I stumbled across while surfing. It is called vozMe and it is a text to voice converter.

I have been for a long time looking for good text to voice converters as reading e-books etc… for long time is difficult for my eyes and I get frequent headaches. I have used a few downloadable software and they have worked at varying degree, but none has satisfied me entirely. One of the main things that disturb me most with this type of software is the lack of naturalness in the voice. Listening to a mechanical voice for long periods is not something pleasurable. The most natural voice I have heard is in the web demo of. But it has a limitation in the amount of words that can be used at one time (300 words).

So how does vozMe differ from all others?

It is a web based application, so it is another service that seems to be moving from desktop to web.

Does it have limitations?

As far as I can see there is no restrictions in length of document, and nothing related to that is stated in there website. I did try it out with a document larger than 1000 words, and it worked fine.

How natural is the voice?

Well, let me tell you that you are not going to be tricked into thinking t is natural by listening to it, but the voice is clear and better than certain software out there. It felt like a tad fast than needed. Overall it’s okay for a web app.

How long did it take?

I tested out initially with small sentence and it took about a minute. Then I tested with a 1000 word document and the speed of conversion is about same, one minute. I can’t guarantee this speed will hold for large documents like books, but still it’s very good.

What options are available for playback?

vozMe will automatically play back the voice using a flash player. Also it allows downloading the voice as a mp3 file.

What languages does it support?

Well it says in its home page that language support for English, Spanish and Italian. I was not sure if this means the web interface id in these languages or the converter can handle all three of these. It was logical that probably it should convert in these three. So I used a Spanish-English dictionary and put some Spanish text and listen to it. I must confess I am no expert in Spanish, but it sounds all right to me. Also above the text box,” enter text in English” was replaced by something that read like “enter text in Spanish”(also in Spanish). So my conclusion is it allows conversion of all three languages.

Any other features?

Yes, it had a two other option for iGoogle Gadgets and webmasters. I decided to check what is in store for webmasters and it was a plugin for wordpress that allowed for users to hear the post aloud as voice. Thinking this was something you all would want to try I went ahead and installed the plugin. It gives the icon of a loudspeaker at the bottom of every post. I want be able to keep all plugins and widgets I put up to test there features (check yesterdays post on RSS Mixer), as it clutter my blog. So friends, stop reading this post and go and listen to it and tell me what you think of vozMe.

PS: I may keep the widgets and plugins you recommend as this is your blog as much as it is mine.