Scott and I were talking about how far speech technology has come in the past few years. We both tried using Adobe PDF reader's "Read out loud" option figuring it was going to be really cool sounding. A voice straight out of a 80's movie came out (monotone 80's robotic voice: "computer working, please wait thank you").

I had thought that after all of these years hacking away at the text-to-speech issue we'd have something really cool and natual but I guess Adobe really hasn't invested in this area.

Today, I have found a really cool text to speech app that runs on the web. It's billed as a web buddy or something ("sell stuff with your very own virtual assistant!"). I think I even saw Sprint using this way back when but I always thought it was canned speech, but it could have been this thing. Check it out:

Anyway, you can type whatever you want and the thing will verbalize it. The lip synchronization isn't that great, but the audio is almost natural. They even have other languages, so if you're looking a virtual mandarin speaking pal for your website, go for it! Actually, the Mandarin version sounds much better than the English version because the intonations of Mandarin denote absolute meaning rather than sentence form like in English. Anyway, click above to try this little widget out...I played with it for a little while and it's pretty fun.