How to make any public domain book an audio book using text to speech synthesis from the Windows XP Language Bar
There are thousands of great books from the past that are public
domain and whose complete text can be obtained for free at the Project
Gutenberg website, but reading an eBook on a computer isn't much fun and gets
uncomfortable after a while. Why not let your computer read it to you?
You can even do something else while you listen.
It's simple to do:
- Find a book you want at
Project
Gutenberg.
- Download it in plain text format.
- Open it in Microsoft Word or WordPad.
- Select the text you want
to hear.
- On the Windows XP Language Bar, click Speak Text.
The Windows XP Language Bar
- If the Language Bar isn't visible on your screen, right click in an
empty area of the Task Bar (the blue band along the bottom of your
screen) and click Toolbars > Language Bar.
- If some of the Language Bar buttons seem to be hidden, right-click on
any button that's visible, and click "Adjust the language band position"
to bring the rest of the buttons into view.
- The two buttons for Text To Speech are Speak Text and
Pause
Speaking. If they aren't there, click the Options arrow at the lower
right corner of the Language Bar, and then click on the icons of the buttons
you want to make visible.
Text To Speech Settings
You can select which synthesized voice is used and set the speed at
which it talks by going to Start > Control Panel > Speech > Text To
Speech.
I find these settings the easiest to understand:
- Microsoft Sam
- Speed = Normal (center setting).
Other uses for Speak Text
- If a web page is very long or the print is too small or it's formatted badly (like white text on a black
background), you can select and copy its text, paste it into a Word document, and let Speak Text speak it to you while
you do something else.
To turn an entire book into a portable MP3 audio book
The specific applications named below came with my
Audigy2 sound board. Your applications may differ, but
the basic method will be similar:
- Open Creative Surround Mixer (the sound board's global audio settings
utility) and set the audio source for recording to Wave/MP3.
- Open
Creative WaveStudio (program for recording and editing .wav/audio files), create a new blank file
in Mono mode, and start recording.
- Open the eBook in Word or WordPad,
select the text you want to record, and press Speak Text on the Windows
XP Language Bar.
- WaveStudio will record the audio while the Text To Speech
synthesizer speaks it.
- When it's done, stop recording and save the audio
file as MP3.
It is now a portable MP3 file that you or your children or your
friends can listen to anywhere.
Recording printed books to audio format
The essential trick to recording a printed book is getting the text off the printed page and into a text file on your computer
so you can follow the same steps described above.
It is possible to do, although you might find that it's more trouble than it's worth.
For each page:
- Use a flatbed scanner to scan the page.
- If your scanner software provides Optical Character Recognition (OCR), have it save the scan to a text file which
you can then open with Word.
- If your scanner software does not provide built-in OCR, save the scan as an image in TIFF format. You'll need to
convert the image to text as a separate step. One application that can do this from .MDI or .TIFF files is Microsoft
Office Document Imaging. In Windows Explorer, Right-click the scanned image and select Open With... Microsoft Office
Document Imaging. After it opens, click Tools > Recognize Text Using OCR. When it finishes, Select All, Copy, and then
Paste the text into a Word document. There might be other applications that can do this OCR operation more easily.
Benefits
I like listening to books this way because
- The vocabulary used in
them is richer and more colorful than the vocabulary in TV shows, and
hearing language used well in a good book helps my own writing and
speaking.
- Constructing
the scenes and characters in my mind makes my own imagination part of the
creative process.
- I enjoy comparing the styles of different authors.
- While listening, rather than reading visually, it is easier to
analyze and think about a book's structure and composition, asking
questions such as: What factors make this book good (or not)? What
scenes (out of the many possible ones) did the author choose to
relate? How does the scene I'm listening to contribute to the whole
and build the story?
I started doing this when I was sick and couldn't listen to any of my
favorite recorded TV shows because they're all comedies and laughing
brought on coughing fits.
Lately, though, I've been turning off the TV
and listening to books because they're more satisfying.
Comments and questions
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