I was reading a post on another blog the other day, and noticed there was a nifty "Listen Now" button positioned near the top of each post.  Thinking it was a podcast version of the transcribed text below, I clicked it thinking to myself "Hey, I can multitask and do other stuff while just listening to this post.  I am the complete master of technology and productivity!" 

What greeted my ears, however, was not the voice of the blog's author but a computer simulation.  It was a good simulation - maybe one or two notches below the Kindle "Read to Me" feature, but it had that sort of HAL 9000 quality - completely calm and urbane, smoothing out even the strongly emotive portions of the text - that rang false in my ears.  The voice sounds like a forty-something American male done up on Ambien.  I couldn't stop listening.

Eventually, the post ended, and what did I do?  I immediately looked up the company doing the simulated voice transcriptions (text-to-voice) and signed up.  The company's called Odiogo, and their service is very comprehensive for something free.  I add a pingback to my blog, and install the ready-made Odiogo Extension for Blogger.Net, and I'm done.  Every time I post something to my blog, Odiogo gets a ping and starts transcribing my post.  They had my entire blog done in less than an hour.

Anyway, this technology is not earth-shattering or anything; the inflection is sometimes flawed, as is the cadence of the speech in places, but it might have some practical use for visually impaired internet users or people like me who either want to try to multitask, or just want to be able to look like they're doing something at work when they're really listening to someone's blog entry.  Eventually I may be able to come up with some really interesting ways to exploit the technology, but for now it's a novelty.