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Talk to your browser

Now THIS is something I'm looking for. Not so much on the "voice recognition" (I can see the office with everyone shouting "Back" , "Home", "Block" at their computers) but rather the "reading of text".

My question is : why can't I get this on my Pocket PC?

I know the resources is one key issue especially with VOice Command but when I'm driving, I want my PocketPC to be able to read my messages just like the old Auto-PC did.

Back to Opera:

One problem with all of these voice commands is that you have to hit a key to initiate it (the default for Opera is the Scroll Lock). I'm using a notebook where the Scroll Lock is some mutation of holding the Function Key and hitting F12. That's just too tough in many cases. so I turned off all keys and seems to be pretty cool now. I just say "Opera, Speak" and it speaks whatever the highlighted text is.

But on the Text to speech, come on! I've been hearing the old MacinTalk speech. Even the Microsoft Agent control sounds ridiculous. Is the MS Audio Server any better does anyone know? It seems to me that if phone companies can offer intelligent voice recognition agents that SOUND like real people, then software vendors should be able to do the same.

Now, the same technology exists for your own applications. (I wrote an article for FoxPro Advisor on this a few years ago using the MS SAPI ). What is nice is that Opera manages to do all this with a 2MB download. (hey! they changed my picture on FPA - that's much better too)


BBC NEWS | Technology | Latest Opera browser gets vocal

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