Computer users are fascinated by the prospect of our computers fully interacting with us. I’m not only talking about communicating via text; I’m also talking about audio. Synthetic speech is progressing to the point where it’s actually starting to sound real. The logic may not be there quite yet, but by feeding lines to the program manually, you’ll probably be surprised at what comes out of your speakers. Give the demo technology a try for yourself at AT&T Natural Voices Text-to-Speech Engine.

You can choose to either supply your own lines or listen to prerecorded content. Surprisingly enough, several options are available. Customization is available for what language and voice you’d like to hear, as well as selections for the output format and sample rate. Once you type in your short block of text, listen to how the “person” reads it. As you can imagine, it’s a lot of fun to type in wildly random things. I can foresee people using this for hilarious answering machine messages. Let your imaginations run wild, folks!