Talking iPods
Sunday, July 9th, 2006
Looks like future iPods may use text to speech to read menus and album names for eyes free operation. And, it looks like the processing will take place in iTunes and get shipped over to the iPod on sync. Brilliant. Read more.
What’s kind of interesting about this whole project is that the solution already exists and is being used by blind people currently. The rockbox software allows for menu structures in ipods as well as well as the iriver mp3 players to be spoken by text to speech. Song titles and directories are also spoken.
David: right, but I thought that in those solutions the TTS was being processed live. This looks to be happening before syncing, in the background on the computer, then the files are synced over to the iPod later. This solution relieves live processing and possibly allows the iPod to have less of a processor in it than it might otherwise. However, yes, I’m quite aware of some of the advances in the disabilities community although might have missed the one you point out. Thanks for the comment.