Take Your Reading With You With ReadTheWords

There’s nothing new about the idea of taking your reading material on the road by converting text to mp3 files using text-to-speech software. I’m sure a lot of tech savvy doctors and med students do it nowadays to catch up with their reading. Sync the resulting mp3 to your iPod — or personal media player of choice, be it the PSP or, dare I say it, Zune — and you’re good to go. I’ve done it once or twice before while studying for the board exams. I’ve forgotten the handful of text-to-speech programs I’ve tried, but I recall that the results were all horrendous. Proper nouns and medical jargon were spelled out, not read. The voice was too synthetic to comprehend at times. I quickly abandoned the experiment, filling my trusty old 2GB Nano with the usual fare.

I think it was a week ago that I discovered ReadTheWords, a web-based text-to-speech application that can convert MS Word docs, pdfs, html files, and RSS feeds into mp3 files. At first I was skeptical, but after several tries using articles and short stories, I found the product superior to the software I tried out years before. The voice still sounded synthetic, but was comprehensible 90 percent of the time. You can pick from about 15 different readers and set the speed at which they read the text. It also gives you the option to stream the resulting mp3 file or embed it on your website.

For example, here is Atul Gawande’s “How We Age Now” from the New Yorker:

Powered By ReadTheWords.com

As you can hear, the software has a few problems, such as comprehending apostrophes, the result of which is the pronunciation of “haven’t” as “haven tee.” Like other text-to-speech apps, it had trouble enunciating some nouns (in this case, “lipofuscin”). I have yet to try ReadTheWords on a medical journal article. Hopefully, it will fare better than the old software. I will make sure to post about the experience once I find an article worthy of my perusal. [Update: check out my review here.]

How about you? Any text-to-speech programs you would like to suggest I try out?