Author archive
The introduction of eLearning has helped educators facilitate a virtual classroom experience designed to accommodate distant learners. Moreover, this has opened the doors and opportunities for flexible and distributed learning environments for students and facilitators across the globe. The continuous developments in the eLearning environment have enabled educational institutions to enhance the richness of […]
Text-to-speech (TTS) applications aid to render digital content into speech. In an instance, when the reader highlights a sentence, it is translated into spoken word. Try it! Select something on this article and listen to it. Whatever TTS features the website has enabled or your device has installed, the basic fundamental remains the same. This […]
The idea of speech synthesizers was first explored around 200 years ago. In 1779 Russian Professor Christian Kratzenstein invented an apparatus that artificially produced vowel sounds. Another invention followed in 1791 when Wolfgang Von Kempelen introduced his “Acoustic-Mechanical Speech Machine”. This machine produced single sounds, but also a number of sound combinations. Different machines were […]
Journalist Nas Campanella has been reading the news for ABC, and Triple J News to an audience of approximately 1.9 million people. What most don’t know though, is that Campanella has been blind since infancy. According to a Broadsheet Sydney’s report issued in 2014 about Campanella, “the 26-year-old Sydneysider has been blind since she was […]
I must confess to generally hating sections entitled “how to read this book” and so I feel that, if I bought it, I should be able to read it any way I damn well please! Nevertheless, I feel some guidelines may be useful. ― Paul Taylor, Text-To-Speech Synthesis Websites need to be able to produce […]
An open source collaboration aims to add Text-to-speech functionality to Wikipedia. Essentially, the whole Wikipedia website is designed to make collaboration easy (aka Wiki). It is now the biggest open source knowledge base collaboratively written by the people who use it. The collaboration’s goal is to allow the site to read out the text to […]
Before, developers had to build their own text-to-speech functionality in their own app. Now, this feature is available worldwide on most devices. This saves hours of needlessly creating and editing audio files. The most recent update to the Google text-to-speech feature is the addition of high-quality male and female voices in US and UK English. […]