Comments on Martin Hamilton's blog: Baked beans or dogfood? Find out, with talking ba...

I'm at http://gplus.to/comth :)

2012-01-24T11:56:18.992Z

I'm at http://gplus.to/comth :)

This is a great great tutorial full of information...

2012-01-14T07:29:14.616Z

This is a great great tutorial full of information. How to follow you on g+?

Jaycon

Arduino

Hey Martin, Can you get in direct contact with me...

2010-08-25T09:55:47.609+01:00

Hey Martin,

Can you get in direct contact with me as I think we are working towards similar goals here. I am doing some interesting work on TTS under linux using SAPI. I have very much the same aims as you and if would be great to chat about ideas and stuff. Mail me thomas lloyd at yahoo dot com.

Funny you should mention that - I'd been think...

2010-08-17T18:28:52.733+01:00

Funny you should mention that - I'd been thinking just recently about doing something like this using Google Docs. One of the recent enhancements to Google Docs is a feature to "OCR" PDFs...
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/06/optical-character-recognition-ocr-in.html
(though it has some limitations on document size)

In other news, why stop at text-to-speech when you could translate on the fly as well :-) http://weston.ruter.net/projects/google-tts/ But note that this is limited to 100 characters at a time :-(

Now if we could drive the OCR of that PDF using an API, then there's a clear path from PDF to MP3. Aha, there is an API for the OCR stuff... http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#OCR

Here's a guy who has knocked up a nice little app to convert his ebooks to MP3 using the Google TTS, handling the 100 character chunking automatically... http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/GoogleTTS-Ebook-Reader.aspx

Great post Martin. Picking up on your early side i...

2010-08-17T12:04:41.521+01:00

Great post Martin. Picking up on your early side issue RE OCR to speech are you aware of any apps that would take Word or PDF files and turn them into iTunes available Podcasts? I envisage using iTunes for the usual but adding in the ability to handle work reading (without doing the reading). It would be so nice to have the flexibility to listen to committee papers, project reports etc etc while away form the laptop. Maybe your assistive technology knowledge could help out?