What do you think of this one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11035

by mukund • 19 years ago

2 8 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

mukund3• 19 years ago

Many a time, i get long mails and i just cannot help but to skip things. So wont it be good to embed a voice based email reader which will do a secretary's job by reading it to you when u carry out other talks? Whats the hard part in implementing this? Has anyone implemented this one?

byrneseyeview• 19 years ago

Paste it into Textedit.app?

mukund3• 19 years ago

i was talking of web browser based plug-in that can do the trick which helps in getting this one

staunch• 19 years ago

I can't imagine many scenarios where I'd have a secretary reading emails to me. I definitely wouldn't use a text-to-speech solution.

thingsilearned• 19 years ago

Mac's I know have the "say" command that will read you whatever you type. I once wrote an quick script that would apply the function to a file and read it for you before I read that you can use the -f option to do that automatically. Also in the first pull down menu of mac applications you can select "services-speach-start speaking text" that will just read whatever's in your application. You could easily set the start speaking text option up to a shortcut key combination to make it easier.

I'm not much of a windows user anymore so I don't know of any tools on widows that might have this functionality. There could be a market for an email app. or browser plug in that would do this for you in windows.

Two of the limitation of a computer reading to you is one, speech is a lot slower than reading, and two the voices can be quite monotonous making it difficult to focus on while multitasking.

I've heard of some really interesting software for the blind that reads the contents of whatever they're "observing" at an accelerated pace. Apparently your ears can adjust to an extremely accelerated rate of speech making the process of hearing the text on your computer closer or even faster than the speed of actually observing it. Imagine writing software without a monitor! If you could get people to learn this skill we might be able to read our RSS feeds (or emails) much faster!

Something somewhat related to this is voice recognition. There is a lot of good software out there that can translate what you're saying into words, it should be hooked up to the operating system so I don't have to use a mouse and keyboard so much! When I visited MSFT on a job interview I talked about this with a guy who worked on related things. He felt that the technology was still a long way away. Prove him wrong!

mukund3• 19 years ago

hmm good point. I was just wondering that its a pain to read long mails and that it would come handy. Just select some voice which is pleasant to hear and then put it as default. I dont know how to get this on but it was just a thought

jwp• 19 years ago

The MSFT guy is right. Full open speech recognition is very hard and a long way away. For some simpler tasks, it's fine.

On a related note, I was surprised to discover that "say" works over remote logins. Try "ssh some-mac say hello world". Good for Halloween.

Tichy• 19 years ago

It would be nice if you would use a more descriptive subject line...

What do you think of this one?

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