I owe Wesley Fryer for the heads up on this Snow Leopard capability. He was blogging a presentation by Maria Henderson.
Snow Leopard has some interesting capabilities that are not obvious unless you read the manual (or happen across an interesting blog post). It turns out that the lowly Preview program has some hidden capabilities. Preview is a little difficult to describe. It is available as part of the basic install and opens pdfs and image files. I can’t say I really ever thought much about what it was good for. Preview has a feature that allows text to speech conversion (the resulting file is stored in iTunes as “Spoken Text”. You have to “activate” the capability which you do within the “services preferences” of Preview (look under the Preview heading for Service Preferences and then select Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track).
The only way I think you can access text in Preview is by using the program to open a pdf. I created a pdf from a small section of a word processing document I had available. You drag text to select and then right click on the selected portion. This should reveal options which include “Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track”. The selected text is converted and quickly available. Finding the Spoken Text content in iTunes is a little tricky – look for a spoken text playlist.
I converted in iTunes to MP3 so I could incorporate an example here (I thought the original in iTunes sounded much better). I also translated the entire document which generated a file that takes 45 minutes to play. So, the length is not an issue.
What I am thinking is that this process would be a great way to generate audio. It really is easy to implement once you figure it out. Cindy is working on a project for second language learners and this would seem a potential way to convert local materials. I wonder if there is a literature on the usefulness of computer generated speech in such situations.
[QUICKTIME http://learningaloud.com/TexttoSpeechmac.mp3 100 100]
