Free website turns electronic text into podcasts

[YAKiToMe!]

YAKiToMe! (http://www.yakitome.com (http://www.yakitome.com/)) is a free website that turns any electronic text into an audio book podcast. YAKiToMe! reads your documents with male and female voices in multiple language at whatever speed you specify. The website outputs mp3 and wav files and XML podcasts ready to download to your iPod or equivalent. YAKiToMe! has an extensive free library of ready-to-download audio books, RSS feeds, and user-community content.

[Rasheed]

Interesting idea, but I couldn't understand much of what the computer voice was saying. I doesn't even compare to an audiobook (paid) or podiobook (free) told by a human, because the quality isn't there. I think it isn't suitable for long texts (yet).

But hang in there, because once text-to-speech technology has improved, your site will approach the human equivalent.

[YAKiToMe!]

Interesting idea, but I couldn't understand much of what the computer voice was saying. I doesn't even compare to an audiobook (paid) or podiobook (free) told by a human, because the quality isn't there. I think it isn't suitable for long texts (yet).

But hang in there, because once text-to-speech technology has improved, your site will approach the human equivalent.

Rasheed - If you're having trouble understanding the computer voice, you might try a different voice font and try slowing the voice down. I, too, had a little trouble understanding the voices initially. But now that I'm used to them, I find them very easy to understand because they're so regular and predictable. I have a couple of favorite voices that I use 99% of the time. If my material doesn't sound right with one of the voices, I switch to the other and it usually sounds OK.

As for listening to long material, I just listened to a 7 hour long book and thought YAKiToMe! did a fine job. (You can call me biased, but now that I've listened to the book I'd call me a little more educated.)

The great thing about YAKiToMe! is that it'll read you stuff that you'll never find on any other book reading site. For instance, you'll never find technical papers from the archives of physics read to you by a human. But it's a easy and free with YAKiToMe!

[Rasheed]

Well, I really don't need the website, because I have Mac OS X Leopard. See this screencast by Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User Podcast:
Text To Audio Files Using Automator (http://typicalmacuser.com/wordpress/2008/02/27/tmups-013-text-to-audio-files-using-automator/)