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Well before my time on Steem, in early 2018, @tts launched a text-to-speech service. You have probably come across the comment (somewhat random though) that says this:

To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.

The links do work and you are presented with an mp3 file of a female (with American accent) reading out the post to you. Their introduction post seemed like it was received well but as time rolled on, people just ended up getting frustrated at seeing it on-every-one-of-their-posts.

OK, you get the point. The problem here is not the fact that it's not a useful service, it's due to the fact that it's randomly converting the posts to speech. It's not giving the content creator or consumer the option to do so, on-demand. It seems like the community wanted this feature:

So (drumroll please...!), I present to you...

@tts.reloaded - text to speech on demand

@tts.reloaded is a bot that I created that converts text-to-speech on demand. And the best thing is:

It won't spam your posts...you control if and when you want it converted.

Here's how it works:

• Comment with $tts under any post you want converted text to speech.
• @tts.reloaded will come in (hopefully!) with a comment and a download link.
• For now, the voice is an Australian male (I'm from Australia, so it makes sense right?).

Here's a comparison I did on a recent post:

• tts mp3 file
• tts.reloaded mp3 file

How you can help support this project

I run the witness @untersatz with @organduo. Casting a witness vote would help us subsidise our running and development costs. At the present time (in this alpha state), we won't be charging for the service but it will be monitored for "fair and acceptable use". We will happily accept any donations though :)

Future enhancements?

• Neural text to speech (more life like)
• Ability to select voice / speed
• Languages other than English

Questions / feedback?

Please leave them in the comments below. I'm also going to go ahead and tag some people in here that were interested in TTS when it first came out: @skorek @winsoar @healthiswealth @the4thmusketeer @indigoocean @stojay007 @kyusho @transisto @dedicatedguy @cryptoaltcoin @ligayagardener @kharma.scribbles @udochiokeke @themarkymark @ireneblessing @jockey @davidmichael @dedicatedguy @alinak15 @ankapolo @clixmoney @samueldc @darrenfj @acidyo @emrebeyler

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