A free web service that turns any online article into a downloadable audio file.
Listen to this audio file.
- It was originally a conventional post made on the Nuclear Secrecy blog. Used SoundGecko & turned it into a mp3 audio file, which can also be downloaded and saved.
- It seems to reproduce the punctuations and inflections quite nicely, in most cases. Though not perfectly human-sounding, a bit more apparent in some places, it still did quite a good job, for most parts, IMHO.
- All you have to do is enter the URL of the webpage that contains the article & provide a valid e-mail id, where your audio-fied article will be sent. You can also e-mail the URL to them [go@soundgecko.com] for conversion.
- These converted files can be synced with your Dropbox or Google Drive account, if you authorise the access [not tried it yet].
- The few times I tried it out, the conversion happened near instantly, though with its increasing popularity of the service & longer article lengths, it may not remain so.
- Would be nice if they provide a bookmarklet, that automatically grabs the URL of the page when the bookmarklet is clicked on, leaving only the e-mail id for you to enter. A button embedded into any page, like a 'Tweet This' button, for SoundGecko, would be a useful feature.
- Option to choose between male & female voice would be another plus [only male voices available so far].
- Integrating it with a bookmarking tool, like Pocket, too, would be a winner.
Pretty useful service this SoundGecko thing is. As its developers put it,
"Our vision is to reinvent the radio with personalized information and entertainment."
Perhaps, I could use the software to turn a few articles into audio files to listen to during my evening run - multi-tasking Zindabad!
Godspeed
Related: Google-powered Educational Courseware [Google University]
image source & info via theverge