TextCasting the Easy Way
EDIT: I decided to drop this blog’s connection with Odiogo a few months ago. While I was initially excited about the idea of having blogs spoken, there were some elements of the service that did not suit my purposes very well. First, the availability of the audio portion of the blog expires after a few months, so you can’t listen to archived posts online (although you could still listen to the mp3 file if you happened to have download it before it expired). Second, the preponderance of technical terms and brand names in my blog entries created pronunciation problems that I found distracting. Odiogo is a fine service that should work well for many purposes, but in my case it wasn’t what I expected.
Regular readers of this blog (both of you) may notice something different with this entry–the small “Listen Now” button at the beginning of each entry. It seems trivial, but it has opened up a huge landscape of possibilities for podcasting, student self-review, and serving visually-impaired or learning disabled readers.
A few weeks ago I became interested in text-to-audio possibilities through a colleague of mine who suggested that I take a look at BlueGrind, a web site that allows you to upload text and have it converted into a downloadable mp3 audio file. I signed up for an account, uploaded some text, and, after some rather non-intuitive clicking was able to download the mp3 file. The text, while clearly synthesized, was completely understandable and well-inflected. Although the site advertises easy conversion to podcasts, it was not immediately apparent how to do this so I went in search of other possibilities.
I found this article from profy.com that reviewed BlueGrind as well as Talkr and Odiogo, additional services that promised to turn my text-based blog into audio that could be accessed directly in the blog by clicking a button or by subscribing to the feed as a podcast. I played around with Talkr for a bit and then tried Odiogo. I ended up liking the ease of use of Odiogo as well as its multilingual possibilities. As a result, I submitted two of my blogs (this one, using WordPress) and Skip’s Tips, a Blogger site, for testing. A day or so later, the Odiogo folks had processed my blog and sent me directions for activating audio services. In the case of Blogger blogs, it’s quite easy–just click on a link, agree to allow Blogger to install the Odiogo widget, and you’re off and running. In the case of WordPress blogs it’s a bit more complicated, but the directions from Odiogo are clear and easy to follow. Once set up, readers can click the “Listen Now” button to hear the text spoken aloud (try it!), download the mp3 file, and even subscribe to the blog as a podcast.
The first thing that crossed my mind was that visually-impaired or learning disabled readers would have an easy way to access my blog. As I experimented more, some other equally intriguing possibilities occurred to me. One was the simplicity of listening to a blog while doing some other task that didn’t require complete concentration–reading e-mail, catching up on news, installing software, etc. Odiogo’s player has a convenient pause button if you need to focus on the task at hand and pick up your blog later.
The possibilities for teachers are endless. Students can listen to your blog entries for study or review or download and listen to them in iTunes or on their iPod (or any other mp3 player). Then there is the possibility for self-review. For this purpose, BlugGrind seems to work best. You can copy a block of text, paste it into a text window on the BlueGrind website and download it as an mp3 audio file. This strikes me as a great tool for rote memorization of text passages or plays, vocabulary review, etc. And again, visually impaired or learning disabled readers can upload a text file and have it returned as an mp3 file.
There is, of course, one major difference in audio files created this way as opposed to those recorded directly from speech–the speech in these files is synthesized from text. They will not have the richness of pronunciation or inflection that a native speaker might bring to a language study task or that an inspired orator might lend to a speech or lecture. But, I think you’ll agree that all of these sites produce clear, intelligible speech that has a myriad of uses for educators.
If you don’t, please let me know.
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Thanks for this review. I’d just like to add that we’ve released lately a feature that could be helpful in those situations you are mentioning: On screen enabled iPods and MP3 players, it is possible to *view* the text of the current played audio file. More on this can be found on http://blog.odiogo.com/index.php/2007/08/31/new-feature-listen-and-read-blog-posts-on-your-ipod/.