Why Use a Reader?
April 1, 2008 by Bethany
A down side of working in a home office is you don’t have someone to bounce your copy off of before you release it to the world.
So, I have become very reliant on Victoria, the voice on my computer that reads text back to me. Text to Speech Rules!
It’s not that I was lonely - after all - with email, blog comments, Skype, Meebo, Twitter… I’m always talking with or hearing from people.
The beauty of Victoria and her friends (most of which are too robotic for my liking) is they can read back to me what I just wrote - without bias opinions. Instead of saying, “You should say it this way…” (which is usually someone else’s voice not mine), she just reads exactly (well almost) what I wrote.
This means I can hear how it will sound to others.
Of course there is the occasional words:
1. “Read” is always read as “Reed” not “Red“
2. It won’t tell you of a typo like using “Their” when you mean “There“
3. If a product name is a made up word, sometimes it can’t figure out how to pronounce it
But overall she is a wonderful reader.
On the Mac, you can even choose which keystrokes you want to use to hear her reading. The default setting was Apple T, but since I am a Firefox tab user (which defaults to Apple T), it made for complications. I use Ctrl Z.
If you are on a Mac, and want to set this function up just follow these simple steps:
1. Open System Preferences
2. Click on the Microphone Icon that says “Speech”
3. Click on the Text To Speech tab
From there you can pick your System Voice and Speaking Rate. Also, you want to Check the box that says “Speak selected text when the key is pressed” and click the box next to it that says “Set Key.”
Again, the Set Key function is automatically set to Apple T (or at least mine was), so choose your preference.
That is it, you are done.
Unless you are on a PC. On a PC, there may be an easy function like the Mac, but on my old dog of a PC, I had to get a software application to do the same thing.
Good News, there is a free one that works fine:
ReadPlease can be downloaded for free from download.com - a reliable source for downloading free applications.
Bad News:
It makes you cut and paste your selected text and has limited voices to choose from, but it is free and I think it has an upgrade option to allow more functionality.
Either way, just to hear your words being read back to you can be a delight (if you write well) or a saving grace (if you are half a sleep and didn’t catch a typo that the spellcheck would never find).
