Adobe Reader’s text-to-speech option

This falls under the you-learn-something-new-everyday category: Adobe Reader 7.0 comes with a “Read Out Loud” option (found under the View menu) that converts the text of the PDF to speech. Pretty cool! The voice is typical computer sounding and not something you’d want to listen to for long periods of time, but it’s a neat option to have, particularly for those with vision problems. A colleague told me about this after listening to the new Technology Review podcasts that sound very much like what is produced by the Adobe Reader text-to-speech system. Technology Review is using AudioDizer to convert all its articles to MP3. (Example article – MP3). Listening to entire podcasts in that mode would probably cause me to poke my ear drums out, but it does make the in-show ad sound amazing.