The Story of Milton
I have been working for some time on typing into the village web site the text of "The Story of Milton, or Middleton, Cambridgeshire, From Early Times" by KP Humphries which he wrote in 1962 and sold to villagers for two shilling and sixpence (12.5p).
I finished last night (it's now online here) and needed to proof read it for transcription errors. I was going to get Beth to help me, but then I had inspiration and installed espeak on my PC. It took only a few seconds to convert the 24KB of text to speech and then I just played it back to myself while I read the original. And yes, I'd made some errors which I've fixed. But I thought you might like to hear what espeak produces. This is with its "English RP" voice and it's converted from the original WAV to MP3 with lame. You'll notice it occasionally speaks numbers out of context e.g. "was published two a full length work", that's because there are footnotes in the original text i.e. "was published²: a full length work".
(download)
I don't think it's too bad, certainly acceptable for what I was using it for. And you can alter the speed of speaking, the pitch and the accent (in theory at least, although in truth "West Midlands", "Scottish", "West Indian" et al all sound like Stephen Hawkins). But for something which can churn through that much text (nine full pages of typescript) in under ten seconds on my PC that's pretty impressive.
