I’m trying to get through my Instrumentation Technician apprenticeship as fast as I can, but between my day job and my night gig, I don’t have a lot of study time. But what I do have is a fair amount of time in my truck, traveling from site to site. Hmmm, light bulb, convert my text books into MP3’s that I can play on my iPod. Hmmm, bigger lightbulb! Write an article on that.

Step 1: Get a Good Free Text to Speech (TTS) Program

Of the three Text to Speech software apps I tested with my text file of tongue twisters, the one I liked best was Spesoft’s Free Text To MP3 Speaker. I also tried Speakonia and Ultra Hal Text to Speech Reader. Unfortunately, those two do not convert the text directly to Mp3 format – just .wav. Other than that, they didn’t have as many choices on recording quality as Spesoft’s.

Step 2: Get a Good Book

There is a veritable cornucopia of copyright expired books out on the web. Project Gutenberg is probably the best known. Go on over, search for a topic and find the book you would like to read. Now download it. Please consider making a donation to Project Gutenberg if you can. It really is a great resource that has been going for about 30 years now.

I suppose you could do this with an eBook you own, as long as it wasn’t for public performance and you didn’t upload it on the web somewhere, and you had the express written consent of Major League Baseball, its broadcasters and affiliates. That’s just an opinion – do so at your own risk.

Step 3: Edit the Text as Necessary

You could skip this step if you don’t have the time. Keep in mind that older books often have different spellings or curious characters that might not be read properly by your TTS program.

Step 4: Open the Book in Your TTS

Well, this means that you open the book in your Text to Speech software application.

Okay, here’s more details. Click on the Load Text from File button.

From there, navigate to the text file you want converted. Select that text file, and click on Open.

Now, your text should appear in the main part of the program, just like this!

I take credit for creating the grumbling gremlin tongue twister. It came to me as I was thinking about a gremlin that was, um, grumbling. The car, not the monster.

Step 5: Let the TTS Do It’s Thing

This is the time saver part. Just hit Record and Create Audio File, save it with the file name you want and walk the dog. Don’t have a dog? Walk the neighbour’s dog – just tell them first or it gets ugly, and the neighbour thinks you’re taking the dog for that ritual you had planned for later. Or something like that.

Spesoft Test to Speech software also allows you to choose different voices, adjust the speed, pitch and volume of the voice as well as tweak the recording quality. Everybody seems to have different preferences, so you might just want to play around with that for a bit. Personally, I set the Output Quality and Sample Rate as high as possible. My iPod doesn’t have much on it. Not much of a music guy.

Now you have an Mp3 of the book that you finally wanted to read. Pop it on the iPod, crank up the Shakespeare and get ready to cruise the strip. That’s kind of lame isn’t it? Well, hot librarians might dig it.

Image Credit : yum9me

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The brains behind Clippy or for that matter Genie or Bosgrove is called the Microsoft Agent. It is a technology which allows an enhanced form of interactivity with interactive personalities in the form of animated characters. These characters can move freely within the computer display, speak aloud (and by displaying text onscreen), and even listen for spoken voice commands.

Office 2007 saw the end of these animated characters because of user dissatisfaction but user interface agents are being increasingly being used in software and presentations to enhance interactivity. This is where the free Microsoft Agent Scripting Helper (MASH) comes in.

In simple words, MASH is a freeware application which allows you to set up animated 3-D characters and make them talk, move and gesture.

Using these animated characters, you can add more pizzazz to your desktop by having it pop-up and perform actions, make your presentations more interactive and also take it your webpages to make them eye-catching. You just have to record and playback what you want the characters to do.

MASH allows you to be creative with the animated ‘agents’ without you having to go under the hood with any programming. MASH turns the backend code into several scripting languages for use in websites, PowerPoint Presentations, email stationery and also as standalone executable files (*.exe).

With the help of the Microsoft Speech Recognition Engine, voice activated menu commands can be used to launch programs, documents and websites.

Imagine an animated character giving an interactive tour of a website or just reading out a file, and you will get the idea behind the program.

The Nitty Gritty of the Program

The program comes with many configuration panels which help to set up the animated characters. The configuration panels can be detailed as follows :

1. Main: Select the character and set-up the basic animation which you want it to perform. The program supplies only two characters; more can be downloaded from the developer site.

2. Advanced Speak: Modify speech ability by adjusting the pitch, speed, volume, characteristic, and context of the TTS (Text-to-Speech) Engine.

3. Map Text: Here you can set up the character to speak one thing and display something else in the speech balloon.

4. Speak Wave: Here you can set up the character to playback the sound from a wav file or a Linguistically Enhanced Wav File from your computer.

5. Date/Time: Set it up so that the character speaks out the current date and time with any desired alternative text.

6. Character Size: Allows the character’s size to change before or during its action.

7. Sing: Let the character sing with a complex combination of musical keys.

8. TTS Voice: Select among the languages available and the specific voice to use.

9. Balloon Font and Style: Set the look of the speech balloon.

10. Desktop: Allows you to use the character to display images and play sounds during a presentation.

11. PowerPoint: Associate a Microsoft PowerPoint XP/2000 Presentation with your MASH Script (*.msh) or Executable (*.exe).

12. Bookmarks: Manage bookmarks which allow the character to play a sequence of actions in order.

13. Commands: Configure the right click menu for the chosen character. The menu items can also be voice activated.

14. Script Output: Select the type of script (for e.g. Javascript HTML, VBScript HTML, VB.net, VBA for Office) which you want MASH to generate.

15. Script: The script viewer with additional controls.

The available options give an idea of the level of customization possible with MASH. Though the program is user friendly, the list of configuration options are too numerous to explain here in detail. The detailed help does that job in detail. The beginner can go for the basic configurations while a power user can use the detailed aspects of the program.

The 5.97MB freeware is easy to use and easy to put together even without an iota of programming knowledge. It is supported by Windows XP and the older versions. The key requirement is that the Microsoft Speech Recognition Engine be installed for the program to function correctly.   If you don’t have it, here is a direct download link.

As an application, it has been around for some time. Have you used it to enhance your computing?  Give us a comment about your experiences.

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(1) SendMeRSS – Send RSS feeds to email

SendMeRSS – Also known as R-mail. If you’re more of an email person and like to follow-up on everything from your email inbox then this is for you. SendMeRSS can take any feed and forward updates to your email. It checks for updates at least once in every two hours so whenever something new gets published it lands in your inbox within at most 2 hours. [All Features].

(2) MailBucket – Forward Emails to RSS feed

MailBucket – Ever wanted to forward emails to your feedreader? Enter MailBucket, a simple online app that can generate custom RSS feeds for your emails. The implementation is quite simple, first you need to create a filter in your email program and set it to forward filtered messages to XYZ@mailbucket.org. Next, open your feedreader and following feed: http://mailbucket.org/XYZ.xml (where XYZ can be anything you choose). While it may be neither convenient nor secure to forward all emails to feeds, it certainly makes sense in some cases, i.e. daily reports, newsletters etc. [All Features]



(3) TwitterFeed – Send RSS feeds to Twitter

TwitterFeed – I have been using Twitterfeed for sometime now and recommend it to everyone. It’s a free service that can be set to track several RSS feeds and send updates to a Twitter account. If you got a blog, you may also consider setting up a separate Twitter account for your blog and ‘twit’ all your blog feeds so that other Twitter users can “follow” it. We have one for MUO as well, you can check it out here.



(4) Pingie – Send RSS feeds to Phone

Pingie (US only) – Get feed updates as SMS messages. It’s absolutely free and works with any cell phone that can receive standard text messages. Nothing to install or download.

(5) FeedJournal – Print RSS feeds to PDF

FeedJournal – Here you can subscribe and convert multiple RSS feeds to an elegant printable newspaper. Just grab your favorite feeds, set preferred layout (i.e. 3- column) and generate a printable newspaper-style document. This is something that would go extremely well with news and lengthy articles.

(6) Wigitize – Add RSS feeds to your Website

Wigitize – If you ever need to add some RSS feeds to your website, Widgitize offers a quick and simple way to do that. Unlike other similar services, Wigitize gives you a really light and plain widget that you can style yourself.



(7) ReminderFeed – Send Reminders to Feedreader

ReminderFeed – Quick and simple way to schedule one-time or recurrent reminders to your feed reader. Just fill-in the reminder form, set start and end dates, and press ‘create’ button to generate custom feed for your reminder.

(8) TagMindr

TagMindr – Another tool to schedule RSS reminders. More than anything else, Tagmindr offers a simple way to remind yourself of webpages or some images you find while browsing the web. Once it’s set you willl be able to easily remind yourself of a link or image that gets bookmarked in your Delicious, Twitter, Flickr or Magnolia accounts. See how it works.

(9) FeedBlendr – Merge RSS feeds

FeedBlendr / FeeDoor – Combine muliple RSS and Atom feeds into one. You can even merge video and audio feeds (such as podcasts) with text feeds.

(10) FeedCrier – Send RSS feeds to IM

FeedCrier – Receive feed updates in your chat program. Feedcrier supports AIM , MSN Messenger, Jabber and Google Talk clients.

(11) ZapTXT – Monitor feeds for Keywords

ZapTXT – ZapTXT enables you to monitor RSS feeds for specific keywords and get alerts as soon as there is a new article that includes specified keywords. Alerts can be set to be delivered to email, instant messaging program or mobile phone.



(12) SpokenText – Convert RSS feeds to Speech

SpokenText – Automatically convert RSS news feeds to speech and subscribe to them as podcasts (via iTunes). You can also download your recordings as an mp3 file.

(13) RSSMixer – Combine RSS feeds

RSSMixer – This nifty tool lets you combine multiple feeds into one master feed and make it accessible via a regular feedreader, iPhone or Apple Dashboard. No-registration requied, simply enter the feeds you want to combine and click “Mix”. Next you will be prompted with a page where you can chose how you want to access it.

(14) AideRSS – Filter RSS Feeds

AideRSS – If you’re subscribed to dozens of popular sources and are having difficulties keeping up with feeds, then AideRSS is for you. Basically, it can take your current subscription list and filter out less popular stories leaving only the BUZZ. Please note, the best way to use it would be on multiple popular sources which publish more than 10-15 stoies per day (Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable etc.)

Did we miss anything ? Let us know in comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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