March 18, 2004
Hear is Something Cool
This is truly brilliant. Internet radio indeed: streaming audio of recent random blog snippets rendered using speech synthesis. Listen. It may take a few minutes to get something good.
Sometimes, I find myself interested in what I'm hearing. Fortunately the main page has links to the 5 most recently sampled entries.
Posted by cradle at March 18, 2004 08:41 PMI am mixing that in with some nice downtempo tuneage, and it is very cool.
Posted by: clif at March 18, 2004 09:24 PMIt's really fascinating... but how come I haven't heard a female voice? There seem to be several male voices, but no female ones. Sometimes it goes a little... oh! there is a girl voice. NM. :) that's about one in ten...
Posted by: Kim at March 18, 2004 09:40 PMThere's an email address at the bottom of the main page -- you should ask them about that. It may be that the sample voices for their speech synthesis system (Festival) are mostly male (which just begs the question).
Posted by: David at March 18, 2004 09:45 PMI did send them an email, I'll let you know how it comes out.
Posted by: Kim at March 19, 2004 11:36 AMI am also impressed you didn't recycle your radio picture from June 9 of 2003.
Posted by: kan at March 19, 2004 03:32 PMGood memory! I almost did, too.
Posted by: David at March 19, 2004 04:35 PMI wish you had so I could have mocked.
When I did Talking Hosts I looked around a lot to find a better voice than the default one in Festival. It was tough, eventually I found a better one, but the female voices I found really were bad.
I stopped Talking Hosts because I couldn't get a shoutcast or icecast server to be stable. I'd have to go manually kill processes and restart it every few days. Just writing voices out to an mp3 file is a lot easier than trying to have it go out live. You wouldn't think it would be that hard...
BTW, wasn't Java supposed to allow people to record their own audio through an applet? This would be much cooler if people could record their own voices.
Posted by: Thomas at March 20, 2004 02:36 PMMock him for his misspelling of "here", instead.
Posted by: Bob S at March 21, 2004 07:18 PMIt's a pun.
Posted by: David at March 21, 2004 10:07 PMDamn.
Posted by: Bob S at March 21, 2004 10:56 PM