[thelist] Synthesised speech on the web

Brothercake cake at brothercake.com
Thu Feb 6 07:12:01 CST 2003


I'm looking for a way of having synthesised speech on a webpage, such
that users can point and read out sections of a page, or click/focus a
control, for the whole thing to be read through.

But I'm having trouble finding suitable technology.  Two things have
been of interest

1 - Microsoft Agent - http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/ - great, but
limited to Windows, and (more importantly, I think) it not just speech -
 it comes with a character avatar as well - which is a ~2mb download
for end users who don't already have it.  I just want the speech
component, but it doesn't appear to work like that.

2 - http://www.soundaround.org/ is very interesting as a concept
(number-key navigation; very cool idea, if a little underdeveloped in
this case) - but it relies on RealAudio streaming - which means I'd
have to make a load of media files in advance, and it's vulnerable to
bandwidth limitations.


Any ideas?



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