Speak No Evil

heh… it can't pronounce “Blog”.

“just press the button that precedes each paragraph and you'll be in BED?”
That's what I heard. Must be the evil weaving it's magic.

hmmmm… for me, it gets about a little over halfway through and just stops talking…? but very interesting b-l-o-g additive :)

I enjoyed hearing it talk about weaving “at amp tea”

I just wrote out the random JavaScript you're after but your blog comments won't allow me to paste-quote it. Grrrrr – I'll email it to ya.

BOO! GET OFF YOUR BLOG!!!! YOU SUCK!!!
You have been officially heckled on International Heckling Day.
No, you were heckled. Do not try to come back with something clever, or I shall return to heckle you some more.

Same here with the stopping halfway through. I think it's a limitation on the 'demo' of the text-to-speech? I vaguely remember visiting their webpage and the demo of it did the same there.

I like my imagination and my memory of your voice from CFH much better. But I must admit it sounds better than the voice emulator I had on my Atari 800XL.

Thanks Chris! I'm still trying to find someone who can make it speak with a “Dr. Evil” voice.
There are parameters within the script you can change, one is the frequency. You might play with different setting of that until you arrive at something you like.
Try adding placing $MTEntryTitle$ remove_html=”1″ where it says $MTEntryBody remove_html=”1″$ to get it to say your titles.

It says “Be-L-ogy” for blog!

Haven't really tested it, but here goes:
In the HEAD, you want:
var voices = new Array(
'crystal', 'mike', 'rich', 'rosa',
'klara', 'reiner', 'alain', 'juliette', 'charles', 'audrey'
);
function switch_voice (obj)
{
var i = Math.floor(Math.random() * voices.length);
obj.form.voice.value = voices[i];
}
and then for the FORM tag you want:
onSubmit=”switch_voice(this);return true”

dun work.

ah crud, no html or conversion of line breaks.

How can I make my own handwriting font?

Happy Steve's code works, but needs one small change: obj.form.voice.value=voices[i]; should be changed to obj.voice.value=voices[i]; – other than that, good code!

D'oh! Thanks Michael.

w00t! it works!

some of the posts I clicked to “speak” came out in french.

hmm… i tried it, it seems that it just speaks the first few sentences…. and…. in french…
Is that supposed to be how it works? It seems to change voices every time as well, and i think languages (not sure).

I sent Chris the code 1st (only difference was that mine specified random of 9, rather than setting a var for numbere of voices) – but I don't think Chris was really serious asking :-( He replied that JS would “…bulk the code for each entry even more”. Surely he's joking. If he isn't, anyone wanna make a PHP version?

…actually I looked at the code again. My version didn't implement HEAD function, but was a script to document.writeln the VOICE line of the form each time. Would make it slightly more bulky, though not by much.

Goddam, it sounded like Enri from Cheers…”I am going to steal your girlfriend, Woody.”

If you're going to use voice, why not use a script that will use the MS agents to read it for you??? Surely there has to be some out there. It's the same text to voice engine that is built into Windows XP. They are already in Windows for crying out loud and they sound a HELL of a lot better than what these “natural voices” do! I was doing something like this 3 years ago with MS agent and the genie character!

Christopher: sure, but if 1) we aren't using Windoze or 2) we are, buit we don't have MS Agents installed? This will work for just about everyone…

Oh yes – the reason some of the voices now sound odd (Chris installed Steve's script) is because they're designed for French, Spanish, or German. If you modify the voices definition to: var voices = new Array( 'crystal', 'mike', 'rich', 'claire', 'charles', 'audrey'); you will only get English voices – with a US or UK accent. It's all explained in the docs on the company's website :)

Wish I could get the remove_html tag to work in Blogger. I almost had it on my site too. Oh well.
http://www.idiotsite.com won't be speaking to me.

chris, dude, remeber: less is more.

sounds like a french man that speaks in run on sentences. pardon moi? qu est que ce? au revoir…

Come on you can touch it. Please

chris, for the love of god, change this disgusting site design.

This entry is the poster child for beta testing….
Perhaps you should consider testing prior to promoting crappy software. Or maybe it's just that your code sucks….

heh…just read through some of the rest of the comments on this post. Isn't it funny how fame and popularity wanes when you don't have your own tv show anymore????

I've implemented this on my site so that it writes a text link instead of a button (click on the “Read It To Me” link on each entry). I get into more detail on my site, as limits in the coment form make putting in code hard.

It's not working for me. I can't even download it to my hard drive like I do with windows media files. So, this thing reads you the blog entry? Cool!