Around 2007 I had a widget embedded in my blog that enabled me to convert the text to an audio file. It was labour-intensive, and the voices weren’t great. Nevertheless, it provided a way of enabling people to listen to an article instead of having to read it.

But at some point the widget was discontinued, and searching for a replacement that was relatively inexpensive and yielded decent results proved fruitless.

However, I recently bought a new application, and have been trying it out. So far, the results are mixed. One piece of code doesn’t work properly (the support team are going to look into it), the facility to add text by copying and pasting doesn’t work either (ditto), and my most recent experience of generating an audio file was to spend half an hour waiting, only to be shown a message that the conversion has failed, and that the support team will sort it out.

The support team took a long time to respond yesterday (much longer than the average wait of under 9 minutes they boasted (a claim which has since disappeared), but I have to say that when they did finally come on the scene they were very helpful, and very accommodating. (The system is based on a credit system. You get 16,000 words a month, and because I didn’t quite realise how they calculate the usage I accidentally processed the same article twice, and they reset the number of credits.)

On the two occasions the application has worked so far (possibly three if this article is processed properly), I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the results. Some voices are more robotic than others, but some are quite realistic.

You can hear for yourself by going to these articles, and clicking the Play link:

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