Thanks to Odiogo.com (via @johndcook), this blog now has a podcast powered by speech synthesis. Not having heard any decent speech synthesis for open domain text (maybe I’m behind the times here), I was pretty impressed with it. John had a post with a quote from The Agony and the Ecstasy and Odiogo got it pretty close to right in terms of pronunciation and intonation. Hopefully it will turn out as well for my blog. Let me know if you give it a listen.
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I hope Odiogo works well for you. I’m impressed with their speech engine overall. For example, one more example of good intonation. One of my posts had contained a line “Don’t ever, ever …” and Odiogo properly stressed the second “ever” as if I’d written “Don’t ever, EVER …” Surprisingly natural speech, though of course there are a few exceptions.
The only problem I had was that the WordPress plug-in made my site load slowly. Odiogo tech support insists that this doesn’t happen, but my site returned to its previous download speed once I disabled the plug-in. I still have the podcast, just not the “listen now” buttons on the site.
I’m using the wordpress.com version of wordpress, so can’t install my own plugins and haven’t been able to test that. I’ll think I’ll just add a permalink to the subscription page and leave it at that.