TextAloud feature requests / questions

[maven]

I've been using TextAloud for a while and I have a few feature requests. It's possible that some of these features already exist, but if so, I haven't been able to find them:

1) option to minimize to the task bar, NOT the system tray

2) ability to reorder multiple articles in Multi Article mode

3) skip to top of current article in Multi Article mode (and continue reading the next article, when finished with current)

4) ability to add a "Delete All Articles" button to the toolbar (and otherwise customize the toolbar)

5) ability to filter text out based on regular expressions (I think this was mentioned in an earlier thread)

Are any of these already available and I'm just missing them?

I've also noticed that TextAloud sometimes stops highlighting the text being read. Sometimes it will pick back up, but sometimes not. Is there a fix for this?

[geneven]

I have noticed the last item, myself -- TextAloud sometimes stops highlighting the appropriate word. Sometimes it stops highlighting altogether, sometimes it just highlights one character.

I can get it to start up again by MANUALLY scrolling the text to the place where TextAloud SHOULD be highlighting. That often causes it to start highlighting the one word at a time it should be highlighting.

I don't find this to be a major issue, but it is a minor issue.

[maven]

Thanks for the fix. I'll give it a try.

[Jim Bretti]

Maven,

Items 1, 2 and 4 that you noted are already on our list. Don't know when we'll get to them, but they are pretty common requests.

On Item (3), are you saying you want a way to interrupt speaking the current article, and restart from the top of that article ? If thats what you mean, you can sort of do it now by pressing Stop, position the cursor at the beginning of the article, and press the "Cursor" button on the toolbar. We'll look at adding some kind of restart that would let you do this with one click.

For Item (5), the Basic Pronunication Editor (under the Options menu) has support for regular expressions. There is some information in the TextAloud online help on using Regular Expressions, and you can also check this link http://www.nextup.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=475 to get started. If you need help getting something to work just post it in the forum.

We're going to put another build up in the next few days that may help with the highlighting problems. I'll post something on this thread when its ready to try.

[maven]

Jim,

Thanks for the quick response. I thought I had read references in the forums to regular expressions, but the link you gave me looks like just the information I needed.

Yes, that's what I meant on item (3). Sometimes I get mid-way through an article and realize that I've missed some key points and want to start back at the beginning of the article. If I stop TextAloud and then choose "Speak Current Article Aloud," only the current article gets read. There doesn't seem to be a way to pick back up in the multi article sequence.

What I've been doing as a workaround is to choose Skip to Previous Article, wait for the previous article to begin, then choose Skip to Next Article. That does in three steps what I would like to be able to do in one.

Thanks again.

[Jim Bretti]

We just put up another build (version 2.162) that might help with the highlighting. Download from here:

http://nextup.com/files/textaloudb.exe

If it doesn't help, send an email to support@nextup.com and we'll check into it.

[geneven]

I would like a hotkey for adding bookmarks.

It bugs me to select Save File To, then get a menu that allows me to choose whether I want to save to Text or Audio, but if I pick Audio, it tells me to do something else. I virtually always want to save to text, myself, from that menu. I vote that you either (a) let me save to Audio from that menu, or (b) get rid of the save to audio option from that menu, since it's not actually true that I HAVE a choice from that menu of saving to text or audio.

[kdwhite]

We'll add it to the todo list. One quick way to handle it is right-click in the article, then choose Save As Text.

[geneven]

Is it possible to get a forecast of the big new-to-come for NextUp and voice technology? I'm excited by text-to-speech and am looking forward to the revolutions of the future. When can I order Lauren Bacall to read my morning news to me? (I've often thought that celebrity voices are one of the waves of the future. You'd think that some computer program could analyze voice patterns of people who have given extensive samples of their voices -- in movies, for example -- and come up with a simulated voice.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could simulate a voice on-the-fly? So, a terrorist is talking on the phone and the government REPLACES the voice of the terrorist with a simulation voice that confesses that he loves the US and has been informing it about terrorist activities? That would certainly be more powerful than merely tapping phones.

Are all these voice companies going to release new, more powerful voices within, say, the next six months?

[kdwhite]

The technology for doing celebrity voices or quick voices just isn't really there yet. I expect that to still be several years away. No signs that there will be any major breakthrough changes in the next year on the voice front.

[D.Leikin]

Hi

TextAloud is really great, but still I’d like to make some minor suggestions regarding Mozilla Firefox plugin. These concern

(i) The volume slider (which is missing now and which might be very handy),

(ii) Speak from cursor and speak highlighted text options (like those in IE),

(iii) Debugging Mozilla plugin for use with encodings different from Western. (In different encodings TA may start reading raw HTML code if the highlighted text has not been copied to the clipboard before the speak button is pressed. This bug shows up in Mozilla only. In IE everything works fine.)

Many thanks

[kdwhite]

These are all on the eventual todo list.

[ilya239]

It would help if when reading a long text, TextAloud could take a _list_ of voices and alternate between them (either randomly or in a cycle), letting the user control how often the voices are switched (every N paragraphs / every X seconds / every section / ?). This would help a lot with comprehension. Would also be nice if TextAloud could automatically insert "musical pauses" (e.g. taken from an iTunes playlist or its own list of mp3 files) -- just like on the radio, they always insert musical pauses into long programs and it helps you stay alert while listening to long programs.

[ilya239]

1. Add missing punctuation before sending the text through TTS. Too much punctuation is better than too little. Many web pages use font size etc to represent punctuation which is lost when you copy to clipboard.

2. Have a mode where TextAloud plays a recording, and when you press a key it re-generates the segment around that point of the text using slower voice settings / additional punctuation. This way you can listen once to the generated text and tell TextAloud precisely which parts are unclear and need to be pronounced slower/more clearly/with an alternative voice, and then use the much more high-quality audio generated this way.

3. Have a TextAloud version for PDAs/pocket PCs which reads text files aloud by generating the voice on-the-fly. Have a button to repeat the just-generated text at a slower pace / with an alternative voice. Then you can listen in your car and "rewind" the unclear parts and have them repeated in an easier-to-understand voice, without forcing the entire text to be pronounced slowly.

[D.Leikin]

Hi,

I’ve got an idea which I’m so excited about that I just can’t wait to post it here. Most likely it had been already discussed somewhere in the forum, but let me post it just in case it’s missing.

So is it possible to make TextAloud options (or at least some of them) which can be accessed on the right mouseclick in TA window, available to other programs? I think it would be great if one could rightclick somewhere in the text, say in MS Word window or any other program, and just select “Speak from Cursor” or “Speak Selected Text Aloud” or etc. However, I do realize that it only looks simple and in fact its implementation may require some sophisticated programming…

Any comments, please?

[kdwhite]

It is possible, but surprisingly hard. Windows doesn't make it easy. It appears to take custom programming for every single program you want to do it in. Much easier is doing something like the global hotkeys we've done so far.

[D.Leikin]

I see. Just couldn’t imagine things are that difficult.

[geneven]

You'd think that "speak from clipboard buffer" wouldn't be all that difficult to implement and would be similar for all Windows programs... programs that fool around with the clipboard are fairly common.

[kdwhite]

TextAloud definately does the speak from clipboard, and has extensive control over that works under Options->TextAloud Options->Clipboard.

[D.Leikin]

That’s it. Watching clipboard is a very useful option, however you’ll have to turn it on and off every time there is some copy-paste job you don’t want TA to monitor.

Ergonomically, I’d be quite happy if TA hotkeys' functions were assigned to buttons on a small floating bar that would stick to the title bar of an active window. I believe many users would prefer mouseclicking buttons on such a toolbar to hitting hot-key combinations, the more so they may wish to find some extra job for their left hands sometimes…

[kdwhite]

That is something we may be able to do in 3.0.