Today's Computer Guy's Tech Tips mentioned an online text to MP3 conversion service named Zamzar and, since I'm a multimedia kind of gal, I had to try it out. I took three paragraphs of a blog post (203 words), saved it in Notepad as a .txt file and converted it. The result was a 311 kb .mp3 file that I opened in iTunes. As I listened to the .mp3 file I was pleasantly surprised to hear a voice that changed pitch and cadence with enough variation to be considered quite usable for things like closed captioning or even podcasting. It even did a good job of interpretation of proper names too.
Zamzar was obviously using a conversion tool with capabilities of the more advanced current text- to-speech software. Like many free services, free gets you the basics including conversion of a file up to 100 Mb. For $7/mo the file size maximum increases to 200 Mb. They also toss in 5 Gb of file storage. For $16/mo, the file size maximum increases to 400 Mb and storage to 20 Gb. For $49/mo you can convert a file up to 1 Gb in size and they give you 100 Gb of storage. Your file conversion priority in their processing queue also increases with each successive level of service.
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