Welcome To VocaTalk Personal Podcast Blog

Hi,

I’m the author of VocaTalk Personal Podcast, an application that turns any given content into a high quality podcast or audiobook using text-to-speech, background music of your choice, and other fun audio fx. I’ve been using text-to-speech, since the Commodore 64 SAM. To give you an idea about what it is, I just did a quick search on youtube. And sure enough, it was there 🙂

Thanks redrumloa!

And then, Sound Blaster’s Monologue seemed to me like a quantum leap back then. I used to listen all the help files and whatever I could find online using Monologue. It was a powerful tool to those who could bear the monotony. I guess the name should have been Monotonous Monologue or something. However boring it sounded, it was definetely way beyond anything you could find on the PCs.

Nowadays, the speech technology has advanced so much that it is hardly noticeable that it is synthesized by computer. OK, If you’re new to this, you’d probably notice it quicker 😉 Anyway, you got the point, to me it’s really good compared to 10 years ago. And it is still advancing at an ever greater speed.

However, you’ll still feel the monotony after listening to the speech for more than 5 minutes. Today’s text-to-speech, is still not really advanced enough to sound as natural as human speech.

Starting from this fact, I decided to create something that’ll reduce that monotony and improve the experience. I started with putting background music to the speech. And guess what, it was a whole new experience now! Yes, just by putting some background music, the overall experience becomes so much more fun, you can listen to generated speech for hours and hours.

VocaTalk started as a simple windows application that just put music in the background. Then I rewrote the whole thing again on Microsoft’s new UI technology WPF and added other features that elevated the experience to a whole new level. To see what I mean, you really have to test it for yourself. Just to give you some idea, here are some key features that VocaTalk supports today and no other application does as of today:

– background music,
– binaural beats, brainwave entrainment,
– digital signal processing, audio fx (echo, positional audio, voice modulator, and more),
– local podcasting,
– direct integration with iTunes and Zune,
– saving original documents in rich format and queue them for later generation,
– ability to rip CD music to put to background,
– ability to put album art,
– ability to split large files into episodes (you can even turn a whole book into multiple podcast episodes or audiobooks),
– background generation,

With all these features and upcoming new ones, I’m trying to create a unique experience that is specifically designed for people who read and learn a lot. Using VocaTalk, you’ll be able to catch up with information and even find time to read things that you didn’t imagine you could find the time for. Since I am the first and the primary user of my application, I am designing a personal experience and want to share it with everyone who loves learning.

To give you an idea bout what it sounds like, watch the ‘War of the Worlds synthesized by VocaTalk’:

There are some other samples too, and you can even download a sample episode to listen on your iPod, Zune or other mp3 player. You can also download the app and use the current beta for free by simply requesting a beta license.

In this blog, I’ll keep posting interesting articles, tips and tricks, and other useful information that I think people like me would like to know about.

To learn more about VocaTalk, watch the videos on VocaTalk’s youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ibenian
and check out the homepage: http://www.vocamedia.com