Text readers on the internet are nothing new, but many people have not considered using such software to create easy podcasts. I posted previously about a free alternative for turning your written blog into a podcast with 
Feed2Podcast.
TextAloud is another paid option that does the same thing. Imagine you have a blog with some valuable information for your students. You would just encourage your students to visit the blog to read your posts, or better yet, teach them how to subscribe to the feed so your new posts are delivered to their favorite reader. If you have a lot of text, it might be fun to turn some or all of those posts into podcasts so students can listen to them.
What’s unique about the $29 TextAloud is that you can buy add on voices that are starting to sound surprisingly life like. You can still tell it is a computer generated voice, but they sound considerably better than the voices you get with Feed2Podcast. But it really isn’t a fair comparison. Feed2Podcast simply takes the text from a blog and turns it to audio automatically for you, but TextAloud is a PC program that allows for users to do more with the text conversion, including:
- change pitch: make adjustments to the currently selected voice even while speaking is underway.
- directly open text files (.txt), Rich Text Files (.rtf), Microsoft Word Files (.doc), local HTML Files, and local PDF Files (.pdf)
- convert a large number of files containing text to audio files
- change voices within a single text article
- lugin for Internet Explorer, to allow easier use of text from web pages
- specify the sample rate of TextAloud created wave files
- adjust volume on a given voice
So, as you can see, TextAloud is more of a podcasting tool and not just a text reader. I was curious about how this all works, so I downloaded the free trial to test it out. First thing was I had to give up my Mac because this is a PC only program. Second, I quickly realized that the free voices that come with the program are not very good. That sound very computer like; however, they will sell you more voices that sound much better for a price higher than the program itself. I quickly learned that the better voices are a money maker for the company. Voices go for $35 for just one voice, so if you’re buying, you’d better be sure you pick a good one. I just can’t imagine spending $70 on a voice.
My sample podcast I created with the program is below. I’m using the included free voice: Michelle. TextAloud saved the text as a WAV file, so I had to open it in iTunes and convert it to Mp3. The original WAV file was 6.1MB for 2:22 minutes. After conversion to Mp3, it was only 560KB.
http://www.freshmancomp.com/podcasts/Text readers on the internet are.mp3
For comparison, here is the Feed2Podcast links. Click to listen or subscribe.
Subscribe to the Feed2Podcast Feed:
Filed under: podcasting
