Online Dictation with Chrome

This is a nice little online dictation application from Amit Agarwal.

You can narrate long sentences in one go and Chrome's built-in speech recognition will transcribe them. Say "new line" to start a new paragraph or "delete everything" to completely erase your writing canvas.

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Speech Input Using Chrome

Thanks to Amit Agarwal, I discovered that you can easily add a speech option to any input boxes that you have on your website inlcuding your search box.

Unfortunately, it only works with Google Chrome at the moment! But, as Amit explains it can also be used with a textarea. Here you can add longer sentences. If you are building up a paragraph, then the text must be copied to another location as the text area is cleared each time the microphone is activated. Could work well with short answer questions for those who struggle with typing text. A free and easily implemented option.

Works fine with Blogger, Wordpress and Moodle. Now, if only there was an easy way to add this option to Google Docs forms :)

Why not try it out below:




Click the microphone icon and speak


Remember, you must be using Chrome!

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Convert your Text Files into Speech

Spoken Text (found via Stephen Downes) lets you create speech files from ordinary text files. The recordings can be created from plain text files, Acrobat PDF, Word files, PowerPoint files, emails, web pages or text entered directly. File upload size is restricted to 981KB so large files must be split and recorded separately.

At present two voices are available - Dave (high quality) and Bob (low quality). Spoken Text is currently working on providing a female voice option. The final recording is made available at Spoken Text for seven days. You can, however, download your own copy of the file in MP3 or m4b (iPod) format.

There is quite a difference between the quality of Bob and Dave as you can judge from the two snippets below (taken from a recording of a four page PDF file). The Dave recording used the default speed of 170wpm.

Here's Bob.......

Here's Dave........

Also came across vozMe (thanks to Judy O'Connell). In vozMe, you simply type in the text (or copy and paste) and select the 'Create mp3' button. You can then download the resulting mp3 file to your computer!

vozMe also enables you to add voice to your website through the use of plugins and scripting.

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Technorati Tags: email, ipod, mp3, pdf, powerpoint, spoken text, vozme

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