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TTS SOFTWARE ISN'T PERFECT YET, BUT ITS TECHNOLOGY AND VOICES CONTINUE TO IMPROVE RAPIDLY.
Imagine choosing the voice you'd like to read aloud to you the morning news or a book as you drive to work. Imagine not being able to tell if it is a natural human voice or a synthetic, computer-generated voice. Believe it or not, the technology is available for you to have your choice of voice. It used to be that synthetic voices sounded like computers and were difficult to understand and annoying to listen to for extended periods of time. Now, there are a variety of high-quality voices, female and male, with different accents and pitches and speeds to choose from. Text-to-speech (TTS) software is ready for widespread use by libraries, other organizations, and individual users.
The Voder or Voice coder, the first electronic speech synthesis machine, was developed initially in the late 1920s by Bell Labs and demonstrated to the public at the New York World's Fair and at the San Francisco Golden Gate Exhibition in 1939. If we were to hear these voices today, perhaps we would chuckle. It would be difficult to understand what was being said. However, electronic speech synthesis opened up a whole world of literature to individuals with little or no sight.
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer on the first print-to-reading machine for the blind. (He was also the principal developer for the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first textto-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of re-creating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition application.) The first prototype for the Kurzweil reading machine was completed in 1975. Original units cost $30,000-$50,000. Although the price has dropped considerably since then, with stretched budgets and a small percentage of people who have need for this, most libraries cannot justify purchasing a Kurzweil machine.
What Text-to-Speech Can Do
TTS software offers the affordable ability to turn just about any electronic text that is not image-based into an artificially spoken communication. TTS can be used to create an audible substitute for-or complement tovisual reading. TTS software forms the basis of screen reader software that greatly improves the accessibility of electronic information for people who are blind or...