Would it be possible for somebody to create cloud-based 'Reading as a Service?' Like you pay someone to read an article to you so you can consume information while you jog or drive or whatever.
Don't know if it would be economically feasible but obviously I'm thinking of the leveraging the fact that billions of people can speak English and many of them can get buy on a very small wage (by western standards).
Could also cache the recordings and make them available too. Although might run into copyright issues at this point.
It seems that you'd be better off using a text-to-speech engine, thereby supporting not just one language but all languages. You'd be right in suggesting that they're not good enough yet to be nice to listen to, but I doubt that's more than a year or so away.
Well, I mean the reason I'm suggesting this is precisely because txt to speech engines are so inadequate. And no matter how much they advance in the next year, they'll still never be able to put things in context like a human reader can (of course, many of the non-native English speakers won't be able to do that particularly well either).
Yes, TTS quality is far from real people reading. I think the service must be something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk but with a SLA since recordings must be quickly generated.
I use very few consumer-facing internet services---but this would be one of them. Some of the things I read are lengthy(e.g. thelastpsychiatrist.com) and having someone read them to me would be awesome.
Don't know if it would be economically feasible but obviously I'm thinking of the leveraging the fact that billions of people can speak English and many of them can get buy on a very small wage (by western standards).
Could also cache the recordings and make them available too. Although might run into copyright issues at this point.