Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Text To Speech for Chrome Extensions, and Talking Alarm Clock

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

Saw this recently on the Google Code blog

Tried it out some, it's quite cool and useful, IMO:

New Text-to-Speech API for Chrome extensions

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-text-to-speech-api-for-chrome.html

As the title of the post indicates, this is about a new Text To Speech (TTS) API for Google Chrome extensions and apps.

Though the blog post title only mentions the API, the post also has links to TTS (i.e. talking) apps for Chrome. You can install them from the Chrome Web Store. There are also links to a couple of other "voices" that can be used for all such Chrome TTS (Text To Speech) apps or extensions. Even without installing the voices, you may be able to run TTS apps using the native voice support of your operating system

I tried out the TTS Demo and the Talking Alarm Clock - both were good.

The Talking Alarm Clock in particular can be useful. Apart from being useful, the audio alarm that goes off when the alarm time is reached, can be played in different ways - e.g., as a traditional ringing alarm clock, a digital alarm clock, a cuckoo clock, a grandfather clock, a "morning in the forest" tune, etc. Pretty cool ...

I had developed a simple utility something roughly like it in Delphi a while earlier

Posted via email

- Vasudev Ram @ Dancing Bison

No comments: