flunn Posted May 18, 2007 Share Posted May 18, 2007 I have an English as a Second Language website. There are a lot of "reading texts" on the site. I'd like students to be able to read the texts and, at the same time, to hear them being read. I'd like to have things set up so that there was a link on the same page as the text which would allow a student who chose to do so to click and, more or less immediately, see a small, unobtrusively placed "progress bar" that would enable them to start, stop, and rewind a high-quality sound file. If it's possible to use podcasts to do this, then I'd be happy to do so because they seem easy to use and have excellent sound quality. But as far as I know, podcasts have to be downloaded and then used on other devices. Any advice as to how I might best go about doing this would be much appreciated. regards to all from flunn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnrcornell Posted May 18, 2007 Share Posted May 18, 2007 The best solution for this is probably a product called SitePal, http://www.sitepal.com which uses a TTS-engine called NeoSpeech. I've actually done a lot of research in this area, and NeoSpeech is, in my opinion, the best TTS-engine by far. It makes AT&T TrueVoice or whatever it's called sound like Microsoft Sam. Of course there's money involved in this. If you want the voice to sound like Automatron-3000 I think the AT&T engines have non-commercial free licneses available. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flunn Posted May 18, 2007 Author Share Posted May 18, 2007 thank you John for your reply. Yes I know about Site Pal but it's not what I'm looking for. I don't want to use a speech engine. I want to record my own voice - or someone else's - reading the texts and have that available for playback to someone who is reading the text. I'm afraid I didn't explain myself clearly enough. If you have a minute maybe you could look at this site: http://chinesepod.com/ there's a little console on their home page that plays back recorded sound very well (and fairly promptly) without altering the appearance of the page at all. If you could tell me what software and/or what technology is necessary to set up something like that, I'd appreciate it very much. best regards from flunn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnrcornell Posted May 19, 2007 Share Posted May 19, 2007 Hey, please go to my profile and email me and I will help you from there. I'm new to this forum and the thread is kind of off-topic so I don't want to keep posting to it. Some forums are very sensitive about this kind of thing (and have a right to be.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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