Convert web pages, RSS feeds, Office docs and more to MP3
ReadTheWords.com is a service that allows you to convert web pages, Office docs, and even RSS feeds to MP3 files. I’ve heard of other services that are available on line that will convert your files to audio, but I’ve never been too impressed with any of them. I even get a little annoyed with my voice choices on my Mac and that group is just about the best I’ve ever heard.
I’ve always been concerned about the quality of the voice being produced by the reader. I know that a computer is going to be generating the voice, which is pretty much always a detriment to the audio quality. It’s very hard to produce an audio from a text reader that someone can’t just listen to and say, "Yep, that was a computer."
After just spending a few minutes over at the ReadTheWords website, I’m pretty impressed with the voices that they’ve put together. There’s a fairly wide variety, with several US male and female voices, along with some international flavor including French and Spanish speakers.
ReadTheWords is primarily designed for people with disablilties, providing a way that they can have access to information that at this point is better than any service I’ve heard before. And it’s free.
The service is easy enough to use. After signing up for a free account, you can create your first 
reading. You select what type of input you want to record, be it a text file, document, web page, or RSS feed. Choose your voice from the available list, decide whether or not you want the recording to be public, and click "Read".
I tried the service out using the RSS feed from this site (which you might want to subscribe to yourself) and overall, I was impressed. I don’t really recommend that you use a RSS feed as the input unless you really have to. The reader doesn’t just read the post, but all the information in the feed. Things like blog title, links at the top of the page, and any other text information in the RSS feed are automatically converted. And some words are not in the vocabulary of our new found speaking friends, like "iPhone".
Try out some of your documents or a web page with ReadTheWords.com and let me know how your experience was.
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