[TheDude]

I tend to stare at my monitor for hours reading about ELM and water cuts and solar cookers. Probably true for a lot of you. Was thinking I should post a topic about how I Love Peak Oil!

Did a little search for Speech Software so I could actually get some work done and still hear the latest on our pet topic. ReadPlease comes in a free version with 3 Microsoft voices, you can set the tempo to any pace you're comfortable with, and it comes with a trial version of the commercial program which has more bells/whistles, and sells for $49.95 US.

The voices are rather mechanical, and sound like a telemarketer on meth, but you'll be free to clean house/dig a root cellar while the program babbles on about OPEC cutting supplies to East Asia. I'm using it to listen to the Oil Drum's Drumbeat - copy all the text, copy it into Wordpad, remove stuff like "Reply | Reply in new window | Start new thread" which the program will read - you can do this by highlighting it and using the "Replace" function, replace it with an empty space - voila!

Another handy production booster courtesy of The Dude!

[gg3]

Yes, Wordpad! Faster than MSWord, and it's free.

The Mac equivalent is TextEdit.

Both produce .RTF, which is a highly useful document format and is cross-platform including OpenSource OSs.

BTW, speech software is included on Mac, comes with a bunch of voices, all of which sound rather mechanical but some of them are pretty good for reading stuff*.

Dude, good point about using this as a productivity enhancer. I could see using it to read stuff to me whilst doing house-mouse chores. Though, good point about stripping all the damn formatting & crap. Whether this is viable for you depends on the comparison between the length of the thing you want to read, and the amont of time it takes to strip out the crapulence so you have nothing but text.

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*Do not use text-to-speech to read illegal material such as bomb scares over the phone thinking you won't get caught. Just as every human has a unique voiceprint, there are unique characteristics of hardware and software that are related to these text to speech programs, that can be used to track you down (details omitted so as not to give baddies any ideas). By analogy think of the fact that the printing produced by every typewriter has subtle but unique characteristics that allow identification of that specific typewriter.