This blog is now available as a podcast. I’m experimenting with the Odiogo service to automatically create an audio version of the blog text. The speech quality is surprisingly good, much better than the Windows speech synthesizer.
You can listen from the web page or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes etc. Let me know what you think.
Update: The speech quality is good on ordinary prose. It even pronounces foreign names correctly. Unsurprisingly, it mangles equations and special symbols. It generally has good inflection. It handles punctuation well, but it does not pause for <br> elements and so lists are unnaturally concatenated together.
I don’t know whether the podcast improves accessibility. I’d be interested to hear whether listening to the podcast is preferable to using a screen reader.
Update: As of February 2015, it looks like Odiogo is dead. Broken link to http://podcasts.odiogo.com/the-endeavour/podcasts-html.php above removed.
The speech synthesis for this is pretty amazing. I was just listening to the Michelangelo post’s podcast and was surprised to hear it using correct intonation in parts of the quote. Pretty cool!