Listen to Word docs and emails on your MP3 player

[Bob Crabtree]

MagneticTime has announced the MT1 series of downloadable programs that convert emails and Word documents into speech via MP3s for use with iPods, mobile phones, PDAs, or any PC.

Three versions of MT1 are currently available for download: MT-iPod, MT-Phone and MT-Pda. Each comes with a desktop player that allows emails and Word documents to be played on a PC or laptop.

The software is priced at £30.99 (Euro 44.99, US$54.99) and currently available in English with new languages like French, Spanish and German to follow, and will be available for Apple Mac in 2006.

Users get a huge discount on the second product they buy; the third they get for free.

Might make life a LOT easier for people who have a long commute to and from the office - give them a chance to catch up on emails and to listen to a whole bunch of other stuff, too.

Might be regarded as yet another thing that sees work encroaching on our free time, of course!

The company is also promising to launch a podcasting app that lets you, in effect, type out a script and then have this turned into an MP3 speech file. Or take a review or news story and and have that turned into MP3 speech.

Mmmm!

Check out MagneticTime's official line here and let us know about your own ideas for using these apps.

Bob

[Workaholic]

Isn't this the same as TextAloud.
http://www.nextup.com/TextAloud/index.html

Except it automatically converts the emails into MP3s?

[autopilot]

This sort of stuff has been around for years. The only thing is, have they managed to make a voice that does not induce the urge to kill?

[Bob Crabtree]

This sort of stuff has been around for years. The only thing is, have they managed to make a voice that does not induce the urge to kill?

Care to define, "This sort of stuff"?

Are you referring to text-to-speech or auto-generation of MP3s from text-to-speech engines or an amalgamation of both with an upload interface?

As for the voice - why not check this out yourself and give us your opinion?

[autopilot]

Care to define, "This sort of stuff"?

Are you referring to text-to-speech or auto-generation of MP3s from text-to-speech engines or an amalgamation of both with an upload interface?

As for the voice - why not check this out yourself and give us your opinion?

When i say "This sort of stuff" i mean text to speech, and recording to MP3 automatically too.

There is no shortage of programs that do this - http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0....&search=+Go%21

As for an upload feature, surely people would have use itunes/sonicstage/whatever? I am not sure why bolting a largely redundant upload interface on would really make it anymore worthwhile. How would it work with multiple brands/models anyway?

What i am really interested in is the actual quality of the voice engine. I have never ever heard any that really sounded good, at least not something i would want to spend more than a coulple of minutes listening to. Even some of the lastest real-time translation programs being demo'ed and CES, which are ment to have the lastest and greatest human-like voice synth, sounded painfully annoying when i heard it on a BBC Go Digital podcast. The Tom Baker one BT use for SMS messages sounds pretty ok-ish, although prolonged listening would make me want to slam my head in a door. I am sure they will get it sounding really great one day though, but i think its still a while off.

I will check that link all the same when i get the chance. Although to be fair, that is a file from the official website. They are going to want it to sound as good as posible for marketing reasons and might not be quite as good a representation of general 'real world' use.

Cheers Bob.

[Bob Crabtree]

DD,

I'm not disagreeing with a word you say - I simply wanted clarification.

I've just sent another email to the company that again asks for with a fully-working review sample.

In that email, I said,

"What people want to know is how good it turns out to be in real life use - and that includes ease of use and, most important of all, the quality of the voice - in terms of its ability to produce naturally-flowing speech in a voice that people are comfortable to listen to."

I've also referenced this thread in that email so there is, I suppose, some possibility of the company responding to it directly.

Bob

[Bob Crabtree]

Turns out that my PR contact has been on holiday - she says today that she'll get a review sample to me asap.

[Bob Crabtree]

So, I've now installed the stuff then done an install over the top of a new and better voice and have done a few conversions.

I've uploaded one of these at random for people to compare with the original.

If you want to do that, you first need to download the MP3 file of a TDK press release - and I've put that here (and it's 1.75MByte).

After you've downloaded that, dive over and get the press release from http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=4837

Compare and let us know what your think.

If you have any specific MS Word docs you want me to try converting, just shout - but they have to be docs that you're happy for us to publish (along with the MP3 file of the doc).

Bob