Re: Monthly chat November
@Pitermach, I agree a lot of TTS voices do sound as they were created for telemarketing and advertising purposes. If a person visits the websites where they sell TTS voices often times they have a sample of the voice reading a weather report, an advertisement, or perhaps a page taken out of a newspaper. Part of that could just be it is free public text to use for a sample, but I'm beginning to think that is also their target customer base. Therefore they specifically make their voices for news and advertisement purposes.
That said, I've read plenty of books in text, epub, mobi, and other electronic formats with TTS and I have sort of gotten use to it. Although, if I can get an audio book with a human reader I'll prefer it over TTS any day of the week. However, I still do a fair amount of reading using TTS as well, because its cheaper to find the book in an electronic format, and not everything is available in an audio format to begin with.
@Dark, while I take your point about the cost of Passport drives and so on they are still relatively more expensive than a thumb drive. A Passport drive can cost anywhere between $99 and $199 depending on size. That's quite a lot of money when you consider the fact most blind Americans only collect $720 a month on SSI. So storage space isn't really that cheap or inexpensive if one goes the Passport drive route.
Another issue is portability. While it is easy enough to slide a Passport drive in a backpack, laptop case,or briefcase they still are a bit balky for travel. Thumb drives are so small they can slide in someone's pants pocket, in a shirt pocket, or in their jacket. I often can carry two or three of them on my person because they are so small and don't really take up any room. While their capacity is nowhere near a Passport drive if one uses electronic formats such as text or epub verses audio books they can pack a huge library of books into one of those drives and be able to carry it around wherever they go. I should know since I have a thumb drive with that express purpose.
For instance I have a folder with about 500 Star trek books in text format. It only takes up about 10 MB of space on the drive. However, if one tried to squeeze that many audio books on a drive we are probably talking about 10 GB if not more. So there is no doubt that electronic formats are more portable even if using TTS for reading them isn't as good as a human reader.
As for Buffy the Vampire Slayer I hope you like it. I use to love that show back in the 90's when it was on TV. I do believe FX or some station still plays the reruns, but as I have it on DVD I don't really need to look for it on TV these days. In any case I hope you like it, because I certainly did.
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