"Robot Voices" And Reading For Expression

Voice Synthesisers and text readers are much more lifelike these days, but still lack a certain something. Something I admit to finding difficult to listen to and often "cringeworthy", is that a word? Today in my feeds however I spotted a space, that set me up for a brief playtime, and thinking about how I might reconsider their place in my classroom.

We have used word processors with text reader plugins for a long time, and my colleagues and I have been regularly entertained by the mispronunciations, the effects that misplaced punctuation has on the way the text is read, and extended periods of phoneme play as we have tried to get the reader to say what we meant. My all time favourite has to be the metallic "youglee," read by an MS Word plug we had once, that no matter how hard we tried we could not get the synthesiser to pronounce as "Ugly."

The space that inspired this post today was "Read the Words," posted by colleague Angela Maiers. "Read the Words" hosts and converts text from a range of sources to audio. The files it produces can then be linked to, embedded in blogs or websites, used to podcast with or be downloaded as MP3 files to use locally for playback. They also offer advice about how to have files read more realistically, by spelling phonetically or including punctuation to effect cadance and expression, even slowing down the pace of the reader. Text can also be uploaded in Spanish and French, though not being a linguist, I don't feel able to comment on this. The space also offers a choice of avatars to read the files for you, and it was playing with these this morning that has lead to this post today.

While playing, I discovered choosing two different avatars to read the same text, gave not only two different voices to listen to, but also two completely different renderings of the text. Here are two examples of a section of the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood," read by "Michael" and "Lauren" The text was copied and pasted from an online PDF file, at Logo.com.

Lauren |Example


Michael Example



Example read by Your Truly



Listening to these clips got me thinking about how I could use this tool in tandem with student podcasting to help help evaluate and think about our use of expression when reading, and the importance of enunciation when we perform texts reading or speaking aloud.

As well as embedding these files in web pages, they could be prepared and downloaded for use within Powerpoint shows or IWB notebooks as shared texts. Comparison files could be recorded by the students, other colleagues or the class teacher, using tools such as Podium or Audacity, to support discussion around the effects on the audience of different aproaches to reading the text. Perhaps sharing a prepared text in this way, with groups of students could form the starting point for a challenge during guided sessions. Can they listen to and improve the presentation together? This could result in them recording their performance for sharing with the class and comparison with what they originally heard. Using voice synthesized files, prepared pre session might be an interesting starting point and way in to supporting critical review of performance, and using the files alongside or embedded in enlarged texts on the IWB, a means for promoting discussion around the role of punctuation, while mispronunciations could be a vehicle for thinking about how words sound in context and modelling the strategies we might use to ensure sense from the text we are engaged with. I would be really interested in any thoughts you might have around this post, and look forward to hearing from you.

Screen Shot Captured from Read the Words via Kwout