One of my regular magazines, Technology Review, has just announced a new policy that will make all articles posted at their website accessible as "machine synthesized audio" that you can listen to online or can download for listening on your "music machine."

Some of our people have mentioned having Text to Speech (T2S?) "voice" readers that can be used to "read a text" to them; but this is an apparently "new and different" feature – for a web site to provide the audio version using T2S technology. Of course, they claim to have a new and improved T2S technology that may also be of some interest.

The article on this new feature (which I first saw in the print version) is featured prominently at the current home page linked above, or you can go directly to Podcasts of Every Article for information. [I note that there is no audio of the information page about the new audio feature.] If you go to any article from the magazine, there should be a header at the top of the article where you can click to listen or download.

The audio versions when you click at the website appear to be provided as mp3 recordings. My dial-up can't support the "real-time" playback, but I can download the mp3 and play it back. The first article I looked at was a 6.9 MB download, which with my connection is about an hour to save. Playback (mp3) was at 128 KB/sec. It's obvious that it's a "synthesized" speech, but is understandable and apparently pretty accurate on a word-by-word basis.

A "subscription" and a software download are required to get the magazine's RSS feed which is separately available, but gives you automatic updates when an article you select is edited or updated. RSS generally isn't compatible with my connection speed, but others may be interested. For the RSS version, you can get a Linux compatible (Juice) version, or you can choose iTunes, Zune, or Juice versions for your Windows/OS-X players.

It must also be noted that some of the magazine's "best" articles are "limited access" and require some special qualifications or paid subscriptions, although quite a bit of good stuff is available for free public access.

Whether the articles at this magazine are of interest or not, those with an interest in the general technology of "audio versions of text" may be interested in taking a look at the AudioDizer web page to see whether it really is something new, and whether more widespread use might be something to look forward to, something to add to a website, or something to ask for at one of your favorites(?).

John