{"id":14,"date":"2007-02-28T00:39:58","date_gmt":"2007-02-28T05:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zingman.com\/blog\/?p=14"},"modified":"2007-02-28T00:39:58","modified_gmt":"2007-02-28T05:39:58","slug":"blast-from-the-past-talking-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/28\/blast-from-the-past-talking-head\/","title":{"rendered":"Blast From the Past: Talking Head"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m on a mailing list for <a href=\"http:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my old school<\/a>, and the topic came up of if there are any good online text-to-speech tools.  Someone posted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oddcast.com\/home\/demos\/tts\/frameset.php?frame1=talk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this link<\/a>.  Wow, I thought.  I immediately recognized the application.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oddcast.com\/home\/demos\/tts\/frameset.php?frame1=talk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/zingman.com\/blog\/blogpix\/2007\/oddcast_speech400.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Back in 2001 I worked for a little internet startup called Oddcast Entertainment. I was one of the main developers for an online character application, a prototype that we were fashioning into a product, complete with end-user authoring tools. One of the first things I did was integrate a text-to-speech engine into the system, and as a proof-of-concept I made a demo, which, although re-skinned, is essentially what you see here. I always thought it was a cool little thing that shows off the technology, and is fun and interactive in the sense that you get to hear it say what you type. My original version had a much larger text entry box, and I used to test it on the poetry of Robert Frost and Lewis Carroll. On the way to being productized, the text to speech part was buried in a much larger feature set, and I did not know they kept around a link to this app. So I&#8217;m happy to have found this page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m on a mailing list for my old school, and the topic came up of if there are any good online text-to-speech tools. Someone posted this link. Wow, I thought. I immediately recognized the application. Back in 2001 I worked for a little internet startup called Oddcast Entertainment. I was one of the main developers &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/28\/blast-from-the-past-talking-head\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Blast From the Past: Talking Head&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}