Android's text to speech gets more expressive and easier access

If you want your Android to sound a bit more robotic or human, you can now choose how expressive you want its text to speech voice to sound - and easier access than ever, thanks to a new speak option in the text selection menu.

StorEbook to Read Aloud eBooks with "Funny Voices"

We've come a long way since the first text-to-speech began reading out aloud. Today, voice synthesis is capable of reading text with a surprisingly natural feel... but things are about to be pushed to the next level. AT&T is researching a system that will be able to read eBooks using diferent voices for each character and even making "funny voices" is kid's books - just like a normal person would do when reading to their kids.

In the future, AT&T hopes to be able to automatically assign specific voice types to characters automatically (funny mellow voices, more scary ones, etc.) and even use parent's voices so kids can hear their parents reading to them... even when they're not around. (That should make things interesting... as the potential for misuse and abuse is... well... staggering!)

Just like anyone can easily tweak their photos these days, using software like photoshop; it seems that soon we won't be able to trust anything we hear. (Well... in reality we already can't, but with more powerful tools becoming more accessible to "regular people", I suspect we'll see a boom in "abuse" scenarios.)

Lips for Gmail

How do feel about being able to write or answer to your emails using nothing but your voice - and not requiring any fancy Flash plugin or operating system wizardry? That's exactly what this Lips for Gmail by Nuno Morgadinho does, using nothing but pure HTML5 - thanks to the HTML5 Speech Attribute - and works rather nicely in Chrome.

As Nuno himself says, it's kind of sad that this sort of thing was already possible in 1990 in the NeXT computer (YouTube link) and to this day is has yet to become "mainstream".