Let’s say you’re writing a novel about a young, swinging British couple. Let’s call them Audrey and Simon. You can hear their voices in your head — but wouldn’t it be nice to hear them speak your words out loud? This text-to-speech demo is one step in that direction. Bonus: The atavars’ eyes follow your mouse around the screen.
(Thanks, John!)
Filed under: technology, writing
I heard about a text-to-speech program last year and bought it, not just for dialogue but to hear whole stories read to me (a variation of the advice to read one’s work aloud). I don’t use it all the time, but it’s amusing when I do. Final Draft, the screenwriting software, also includes the feature and there you can assign different voices to different characters so you can hear them speak to each other. That’s also a good tool.
I had no idea writing software had become so sophisticated! I’ve been fiddling around with Microsoft’s built-in speech recognition program. I got the idea after reading in the NYT that Richard Powers composes his novels using speech recognition. So far it’s more trouble than it’s worth to keep having to back up and correct mistakes, but it’s fun to fool around with and something different to try when I’m stuck.
[...] Dialogue verifier [...]