If it can read a Web page, why not a journal article?

09 June 2004

File this under “I can do it, but do I really want to?”. James Farmer has made available an audio recording of a journal article. The idea, then, would be to have several people record themselves reading journal articles and making those recordings available to the public. Burn a CD and learn on your daily commute.

Knowing that people would not tolerate my voice any longer than necessary, I thought back to when I was learning about accessibility and experimenting with voicing browsers and text-to-speech technologies. At home I toyed with giving my 4-year old daughter an email account and setting up her mail client to send the messages through a program that would read the messages to her–you know, so Grandma could email her. That experiment basically worked, except I could not get the text-to-speech app (Festival) to skip the email headers, which made it very annoying.

So today I revisited Festival and discovered that I could use the text2wave script to create a .wav file from a text file. I copied the article The Sustainability of Distance Training: Follow-up to Case Studies to plain text and sent it to the script and ended up with a 26MB .wav. I encoded the wav to MP3 (using LAME) and ended up with a 2.5MB MP3 that plays for 14:05.

Here is the info on the text:

Title: The Sustainability of Distance Training: Follow-up to Case Studies
Characters: 12587
Lines: 92
Words: 1808
Encoding Time: 2:44.37 (that's two minutes 44 seconds)

And here’s the mp3.

How long can you stand to listen to the computer voice? ;) If I could find a better voice and get the tts to go faster, it might be tolerable. Oh well, it was a fun experiment!

4 Responses to “If it can read a Web page, why not a journal article?”

  1. James Farmer
    June 10th, 2004 - 8:38 pm

    Sweeeet… good stuff… here’s to hearing you though ;O)

  2. cogdogblog
    June 12th, 2004 - 1:10 am

    Why Not Let the Machines Read to Us?
    James Farmer has shared an interesting idea of building a collection of audio “readings” of articles, and Stephen Downes has taken the idea and ran it as an online audio jukebox. I’m not much of an avid reader of academic…

  3. inter-net-viewer.nl
    June 12th, 2004 - 4:46 pm

    Ed Radio (en verder…)
    “You’re listening to Ed Radio, your online learning and educational technology internet radio station. We collect audio recordings from around the internet and collect them here for your listening pleasure.”

    Een idee van Stephen Downes die op zij…

  4. inter-net-viewer.nl » Ed Radio (en verder…)
    June 12th, 2004 - 8:46 pm

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