Text-to-Speech

It came to my attention today that speech-to-text has a counterpart that can be just as useful for communication. Text-to-speech programs are a great option for someone with a visual impairment. This type of program would allow anything typically delivered in a text format to be accompanied by the spoken word (i.e., spoken emails and text messages).

Here's a tutorial on how to set up text-to-speech for your Motorola Droid or phones that run the Android OS.  Text-to-Speech Tutorial



The iPhone's SpeakIt app ($1.99) has some more advanced options, like highlighting the words as they are spoken, choices of voices, and reading from websites. SpeakIt Tutorial

Prevention Prevention Prevention

In the name of keeping a  healthy mind and preventing a loss in language skills with age, I cannot stress enough the importance of an in-tact memory. Your memory gives you access to all of your... what's the word I'm looking for... vocabulary and language structure. So put some time in on your memory and reap the benefits later in life.

Crossword puzzles, trivia, and reading are no-tech ways to go about it. If the allure of lights and sounds is what you're looking for (like me) you might enjoy a memory app for your iPhone or Droid. One way to go about this is to search for a free memory app in your app store.

I've found one with good reviews available for iPhones in the iTunes store. TapMemory is fast paced and "addicting" as far as memory games go.

Here's a quick tutorial on how to run the program:

Speech to Text

I've found a variety of speech-to-text services available for PC's, Macs, and phones.

Google Voice allows speech-to-text functions for incoming voicemails (sent in a text format to your gmail account) and for outgoing dictations (by calling your Google Voice number and leaving yourself a message).

Dragon Dictation is available for the iPhone or iPod Touch from Nuance. There is no fee for the service, and any text functions can be completed with a speech command. This product seems to be reliable and quick.

ShoutOUT from Promptu systems comes on Motorola Droids and is the program I can personally vouch for. I'm a frequent speech-to-texter and I find it to be fast and user friendly. Most screens that include a text entry have a microphone image available, and tell you when to start speaking.

Mac Speech Dictate is reviewed by George Williams, "Profhacker." He said, "This desktop application for the Mac environment works surprisingly well. I’ve used it occasionally and been impressed by the accuracy of its speech recognition. However, I’ve found it awkward to speak out loud the punctuation and paragraph breaks necessary for proper formatting with such a tool. The awkwardness would probably diminish with continued use, but I haven’t gotten there, yet... My understanding is that (Dragon Naturally Speaking) works in essentially the same way as MacSpeech Dictate."