When the people at BlueGrind say they're in beta, they mean it. The website nearly doesn't work at all. Even the 'About' and 'Contact' pages don't yet exist, so this post is going to be full of a lot of speculation. That said, however, BlueGrind is too compelling for me to pass up.
BlueGrind is a text-to-speech technology provider. Their website, or what of it exists right now, talks a lot about "textcasting" and turning your text into a podcast. It is exciting to think that someday there might exist a website that could automatically turn your blog into a podcast for blind website visitors or simply for people to take your words with them on their iPods.
Since, as I said, BlueGrind doesn't yet give many hints on what their service will actually do, I can only speculate. What would be great, is if blog owners could plug in a feed and have their posts automatically turned into speech and fed back into a widget on their page, with MP3s available for download. Of course, none of that is really worth anything if it sounds terrible.
What BlueGrind's website does offer right now, is a tech demo. You can listen to TTS recordings that are fed from various news sources, or after signing up, upload your own. I decided to give it a little test to see what it could do and tried to trip up the service. Below are the results.
Here is the full text that I used for the demo:
Hello readers. You are listening to a test of the BlueGrind technology for Read/WriteWeb. I have often been skeptical of screen readers. We all remember the crummy sounding, far-too-robot-like voices from the 1990s. But this one sounds pretty good. Let's see if we can trip it up. How will it pronounce the name of the president of Iran? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That was actually better than many television news personalities! How will it handle some symbols? I will be purchasing $5 worth of widgets @ 7%. The order # is 440993-442.
Because BlueGrind does not offer a widget (yet?), I used one from MyFlashFetish for the purposes of this demo. (Just press the triangle.)
I was impressed by how well BlueGrind's technology was able to tackle my test. The only place it really messed up, was skipping the # symbol. But that's a relatively minor slip. I'm not sure if this technology is licensed or developed in house, but in my opinion it is ahead of AT&T Labs' TTS demo. Of course, as with most screen reading technology, BlueGrind's accents the wrong words on occasion, which can be a bit jarring for listeners, but that's to be expected.
It still remains to be seen what services BlueGrind will offer to bloggers. Their page mentions podcasting in a conventional manner (i.e., downloading and taking MP3s with you), but it's anyone's guess whether they will offer a service that allows bloggers to stick text-to-speech stuff directly on their own blog posts with a widget (as I hope), or simply feed content into a BlueGrind portal and require bloggers to send their visits to the BlueGrind website to retrieve TTS content.
What do you think of BlueGrind's text-to-speech technology? Do you know of any other players in this area?
Comments
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How is this different from the text to speech converter that scribd.com offers? audio is converted into a convenient mp3 format.
Posted by: John Yu | April 27, 2007 1:39 PM
TTS is not new, but if they can provide some killer feature (e.g. groupcasting etc) they might make it.
Posted by: fo.unta.in | April 27, 2007 1:40 PM
@John Yu #1: Well, the technology is similar, but I would say the usage is likely to be vastly different. Scribd i is sort of YouTube for documents... I am really hoping that BlueGrind will allow bloggers to do instant TTS for their blog posts.
Also... Scribd's results can sometimes be completely unintelligible.
Take this, for example: http://www.scribd.com/doc/40044/How-To-Create-A-Live-CD
The audio version is just a 34 minute string of nonsensical letters and numbers. Not very helpful, if you ask me.
Posted by: Josh Catone | April 27, 2007 1:54 PM
I believe MagneticTime.com also do this with their iNewsCaster product.
Posted by: James Corbett | April 27, 2007 1:56 PM
@#4: The MT-Podcast service sounds cool, though is really pricey... $199 for TSS on ten 4,000 word articles. Also, I am hoping this is a typo on their site:
They're advertising that their services cost more than trained voice talent.
Posted by: Josh Catone | April 27, 2007 2:01 PM
yes yes be added you and 0 Support
Posted by: Video | April 28, 2007 4:00 AM
International Herald Tribune has a "Listen to Article" button on each article which provides similar voice„ÄÄreading.It's„ÄÄpowered ReadSpeaker.com and the quality is good. Check it out.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/28/europe/web0428-france-41375.php
Posted by: toshio | April 29, 2007 1:55 AM
Or if you want a full solution (accessibility, rss to audio podcast, fun mod for a blog) try http://www.talklets.com and http://www.chatterblogs.net (powered by Talklets on Drupal)
e.g. here's a podcast of this site's rss:
http://217.199.172.190/PodTalk1_01/default.aspx?RSSURL=http://www.readwriteweb.com/rss.xml&TBID=19dd107
You need to contact them re podcasting and modules, but major CMS mods are about to be released openly (the service is free for low band width but cost for larger sites...)
Posted by: Phil Teare | April 29, 2007 5:21 AM
I've been using Talkr to provide a podcast of my text-only blog for about 6 months now. Feed2Podcast provides a similar service, although the voice isn't quite as easy on the ear and my feed stopped working recently. I posted on both last November over at fabric of folly.
Posted by: Dan Taylor | April 29, 2007 12:00 PM
I think this post should have been titled around "TEXTCASTING" with some reference to "BLUEGRIND". Seems a great boost to the startup when the website, as you pointed out, does not even work properly.
Posted by: Adrian Keys | April 30, 2007 6:52 AM
Have you heard of AudioDizer - they just launched their service with MIT Technology Review the magazine. It sounds pretty good and you can download articles on iTunes as well.
Posted by: Amrita | April 30, 2007 8:58 AM
We sold a startup last March to Vodafone, Ireland that performed something similar.
Posted by: Prolific Programmer | April 30, 2007 1:31 PM
Hearing their (BlueGrind) voice I can recognize Paul from NeoSpeech
( http://www.neospeech.com/demo/demo_text.php | http://www.neospeech.com/ ).
You can buy one voice (e.g. Paul 16kHz for ~$35, http://www.nextup.com/neospeech.html). I think you can use it for your blog...
I use it all the time for listening to the news/articles/ebooks.
Posted by: Radek | May 1, 2007 5:12 AM
Actually I have the Nextup newsreader also with the paul voice from Neospeech. I think it's nott the same. I thought it was familiar, but I put the same text in both their website and the nextup textloud program that I have. The processing was different. it seems like the Bluegrind one was more accurate, specially with the dates and time and the website addresses and some language differences.
The voice is also slightly different to me when I listen to them side by side.
Just as a sidenote, I have also tried the AT&T voices, and after a while they all sound the same, but I think this bluegrnd one is differnt than the nextup one or the neospeech one.
Posted by: Amir Srivihasan | May 1, 2007 2:31 PM
The Alex voice in Apple's upcoming (and late) Leopard is actually quite good too and will be EXTREMELY easy to pipe RSS, URL or whatever into it and output an AIFF postprocessed to MP3 (or any other stock format).
I'm kind of fond, too, of the Cepstral voices. Pretty good there. Especially the German voices speaking German AND English. Nice stuff that!
The problem with all these voices is the complexity of enunciation, inflection, pausing, etc. It's hard as hell to take a stock set of rules and get it right every time. It's fun watching this stuff evolve though! It gets better and better every year.
Posted by: Gerald Buckley | May 4, 2007 6:43 AM
Actually, I have heard the Cepstral voices, they are Sh*t. You can tell very easily that they are synthesized. I haven't heard the "Alex" Voice, I am very curios to hear it.
I love this Text to speech technology, it is a great time saver for me, specially because i have to drive so much.
Posted by: Amir Srivihasan | May 19, 2007 7:56 PM
Hi Josh,
I just wanted to let you know that we do listen to what you say, and do try to implement what our audience is looking for. In your initial comments you mentioned it would be nice to have this for bloggers to use on their site. We worked feverishly to finish and test out the blog module. We have released the service to accomodate blogs, (Wordpress and Blogger for now).
If you would like to test it out, you can at: www.BlueGrind.com/blogs.html and let us know if you like it. We have also implemented a Radio type player feature, so if the blog has more than one article, the player plays the articles in succession as if it is a Radio channel devoted to that blog.
As an example of this multi article Radio Channel, the link to our BlueGrind updates blog is http://www.bluegrind.com/radio_player.html?feed_id=18 but it would be much better if you go to the blogs page and open it from there. (It opens in a compact window).
We are working on giving bloggers the capability to put this Radio Player on their own blog site which opens up at the click of a button and plays their list of articles. But for now, what our system does (If you follow the step by step instructions in the submitting steps of the blog) it puts a slim player, wherever the blogger wants in the blog posts.
It involves making a slight modification in the template, and the insertion of the permalink (this is only done once) and our system takes over from there. Whenever there is a new blog posted, BlueGrind will generate the audio and link it to the blog post automatically, and the player appears at the bottom of the post. (look ma, no hands!)
The site is in Beta, I know this doesn't go over well with some people, we can wait till we finish everything and release it later, or we can release them sooner for the early adopters and work on the designs and features later. Our mindset is, we'd rather get the new features out into the hands of the user and have them bang on them for a while and let us know what "They" want changed etc. I hope this works for you guys.
We'll wait to hear from you. Oh, BTW, there is an audio version of this post (Only my comment of course) at (Audio Version)
Diran
Posted by: Diran Afarian | May 24, 2007 2:53 AM
Just wanted to show you an example of a nice blog using this new BlueGrind "Blog to Podcast" capability. You can look at it by going to:
http://www.linuxtomacbook.com
As you can see, it has the audio player embedded within each post, and it is actually being generated automatically every day as new articles get submitted by the Blogger.
Thanks,
Diran
Posted by: Diran Afarian | May 26, 2007 8:26 PM