Quote:
Originally Posted by jgaiser
It's good that you've found TTS to be useful.
For me, it's just aggravating. Mispronounced words. Poor punctuation flow. Just painful. If my eyesight got so poor that I could no longer read, I'd be looking into Books for the Blind (a lifesaver for my Mom when she lost her sight), LibraVox and Audible. |
I sometimes use TTS (on my computer, not on my ereader) to review my writing, because I often hear problems in the text that I haven't seen. When I first started it was very aggravating - I write fantasy and the mispronounced words problem was a significant distraction. The software I use now allows me to define pronunciation for words, and this made a big difference. Yes, punctuation flow is sometimes still off, but most of the time it's not unbearable (the software and voices you use do make a big difference).
I haven't checked out epub v3 in any detail, but it seems to me that ebooks could be written to supply custom pronunciation for TTS in their metadata (assuming they can agree on a standard), and writers could easily supply such data - and so make TTS a viable option for almost any book. Not that this is likely to happen any time soon, I suppose, but it would be a way of making many more book available to those that need or want audio.