Text-to-speech attachment

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
- Gerard Nolst Trenité, “The Chaos”

English is a silly language. Words that look the same are pronounced entirely differently, like through, though, thorough, and tough.

Our latest feature, Talk for me, is a text-to-speech tool that takes the guesswork out of pronunciation.

How Talk for me works

Talk for me is text-to-speech tool that converts your text into spoken words. You’ll find it as an attachment option when you add a post. Add up to 1000 characters of text, and we'll generate an audio recording for you.

We support 47 text languages, including variations like American, British, and Australian English. The tool can automatically detect the language you're using, or you can select it manually.

Making collaboration and learning more accessible

Language shouldn’t be a barrier to collaboration and sharing good ideas. That’s one reason we translate our website and knowledge base into so many languages.

Talk for me is an extension of this idea. When our intern, Bryan, built this tool, multi-language support was a main criteria for him when selecting our text-to-speech model.

Talk for me can benefit a wide range of users. It's great for anyone who wants to hear words pronounced correctly. This is especially useful for second-language learners who need audio support for text. Teachers will find it valuable when they want to share the exact pronunciation for vocabulary without recording their own voice. It’s also fun to play with interesting language combos (e.g., hearing what Korean sounds like in an Australian accent).

How to use Talk for me

Using Talk for me is simple. When adding a post to your padlet, reveal all attachment types and click Talk for me. It's that easy to give your posts a voice.

Talk for me is available immediately for all users on web.

What’s next?

We will add mobile support, so you can use Talk for me on the go. We also want to support the ability to go back to your generated audio to edit the text and regenerate the audio. And, to make it more fun, we want to add different voices and voice effects.

If you have any feedback about this tool or have a fun voice effect you think we should add, please contact us. And if you made it this far, please enjoy this reading of “The Chaos” generated by Talk for me.