This morning I happened to click on something at the bottom of a decade-old HE review, and lo and behold I was suddenly listening to an automated woman’s voice reading the review aloud, and sounding pretty cool at that.
In short I had accidentally stumbled upon a Text-To-Speech (TTS) capability that I didn’t know I had.
In less than ten seconds I had decided that I had to install a TTS plug-in of some kind that would make it easy for the slowest, oldest, least adaptable HE readers out there to listen to my latest jottings while driving to work or whatever.
Every review or rant or riff that I’ve ever written will soon be available in spoken-word form. And I can choose any voice…one with a Joni Mitchell-like twang, a cultured Meryl Streep or a blithely urbane Cary Grant, my own voice, one that sounds a bit like Lee Marvin (“My heart was lighter then”) or Edward R. Murrow….anything.
