Read the International Herald Tribune from your car

International Herald Tribune is one of my favorite newspapers, one I enjoyed regularly while living in Tokyo in the 1990s.  They recently started  a new Audionews feature on their website http://www.iht.com.  I'm a pretty regular podcast listener (I listen to recorded NPR on my daily commute), so this morning I took it for a short spin and I was pretty impressed -- at least, impressed by the standards of current state-of-the-art TTS.

They offer most of their news articles in Podcast form, almost as soon as they're posted. The nice thing about TTS of course is that they don't need to wait for a "professional" broadcaster to record anything, so the audio is available almost as soon as the text.

After a while, unfortunately, it becomes tedious. It gets several obvious pronunciations incorrect (e.g. "Sunni" is "sunny") which is particularly frustrating because it repeats the same mistake over and over The voice is just natural enough to sound inviting, but listening quickly becomes a chore. I think if you're in a situation where you must listen, because it's something you need to hear but for some reason you're unable to read it, you would find this useful because you have no alternative. For me, though, I quickly found myself distracted and wanted to change the station.

The technology comes from a company called Readspeaker, in Sweden. Their web site describes their vision for making the Internet "accessible for dyslexics, people with English as a second language, people with learning disabilities, elderly with impaired vision, etc.", but doesn't indicate where they acquired the TTS technology that powers the reader. 

But this technology will continue to improve, and with it the number of people who will find this a useful way to access content that was previously only available to those who were in a situation where they could open up a newspaper and read.