Robo Voice for Skype Chat is here. It's a Skype text Audio reader that puts the text chat into live voice ! It will shout out your chats. Could be a help for blind people.

Well there are still things that continue amaze me. I thought I had seen everything, but obviously I am not looking far enough into the future… Currently I am listening to my incoming text-chats in Skype. 

I just got a little application (in beta) especially for Skype; thrown to me by my Italian friend «magnet» and this is what he made.

Lets’ call it the Skype Robo Voice. It actually speaks the text that arrives in the skype chat box.

This could be very useful for blind people or just simply for fun during listening to people who throw long texts into the Skype chat window. As we speak I am listening to a background chat being read to me by this voice-engine. Nice stuff. I like it.

What I can do now for example is connect my MP3 FM module to the output of the PC and send the signal over FM to my clock-radio in the kitchen (just put it on the same frequency) and when somebody chats I will hear it instead of missing it. It’s a little thing but very useful.

This is a non commercial beta-version and there is more to come of course. No standard support will be supplied (but friendly chat is okay). Feel free to test it out.

Download test version here : Robo_Skyper_v2_clean.exe (48 KB)

! You need to have the  SAPI 5.1 from Microsoft. But in the up to date European Windows XP version this voice engine should be built in. The Active S API as to be installed in order to run this application.

You can also make it sound more human with :

• loquendo TTS voice pack
• or simply more free voices here    
• and use an actor with http://actor.loquendo.com/actordemo/default.asp?language=en

We also found this auditive aid that can be used also for skype deaf-blind users. But you have to buy some hardware. In our case it is just a plugin (beta) that runs on top of Skype.