Techwire

The Verge has a cool video about how text-to-speech videos are produced. Given that so many assistive technologies rely on text-to-speech voices it is interesting to learn how they have been improved over the years to sound more realistic. One of the most well known applications of text-to-speech is Apple's Siri . The video features Nuance the makers of Dragon .

Prizmo 2.0 for iOS was just released in the App Store. Prizmo now works on the iPad as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch. The update includes many exciting new features. The original version of Prizmo included optical character recognition ( OCR ) but did not include the ability to scan documents to a PDF or text file. The PDF files are not just images but include searchable text. Prizmo 2.0 also allows users to export the documents to other apps. To create a new document in Prizmo you can simply take a picture of multiple pages. Prizmo will automatically detect the edges of the page. In version 2.0 you no longer have to crop documents manually. Once you have captured all of the pages you can recognize the text of the document which is surprisingly fast and accurate. If the Prizmo does make a mistake you can edit the OCR zones or manually edit the text. After the text has been recognized you can email or export the document as a PDF or te...

Google Play Books is the Google's ebookstore and companion reader apps. The Android reader app was recently updated to include a text-to-speech read aloud feature. Click here to download the free app for Android. The text-to-speech voice is a little above average but gets the job done. The read aloud feature works with most books in the Google Play store. If you have an Android device be sure to check this app out. Click read more below to view screenshots of Google Play Books.