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Text to speech

Graham Davies is a bit of a guru on all things ICT/languages-related and today he posted some links to sites where you can play with text to speech. Voki is quite popular, though it seems a bit gimmicky to me. I have used a text to speech site in class which the pupils liked:

http://text-to-speech.imtranslator.net/

You can have fun writing the text in French then choosing another language for the character to speak in. The results are amusing. If you don't know what text-to-speech means, basically you type in text and a computer voice reads it for you. With Voki and others you get a face as well. Here are Graham's links. Check out his ICT4MFL site too.

José Picardo's Box of Tricks blog has some good tips on using Voki:
http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=104

There are other Text To Speech (TTS) and Text To Movie (TTM) tools on the Web. My two granddaughters, aged 3 and 5, love Acapela:
http://www.acapela.tv

Read the Words works a bit like Voki:
http://www.readthewords.com

More on TTS and TTM tools can be found here:
Module 3.5, ICT4LT site
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-5.htm#synthesis

More on animation tools, comic strips etc can be found here
Module 1.5, ICT4LT site
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm#comictools

Thank you, Graham.

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