User:Drat/Listen to the article

=Listen to the article!= Now of course, one of the important tasks with any article is proofreading. Little spelling, grammar (and just plain wording) errors can crop up in all kinds of places. But this can be annoying to find. One major problem is that some of it can just go completely unnoticed, thanks to the fact we humans do not need to read every letter of every word to get the meaning.

One way to solve this is to listen to the article. The easiest, and most logical way to do this, is to read it out aloud. However, this is not always convenient (I don't see someone doing this at work in a busy office), and you would best read it to someone else (or have them read it to you) as the reader would be concentrating on reading the article, not assessing it.

Instead, try feeding the text of the article to a speech synthesis program. You'd be surprised at the errors you can pick up. Whenever something sounds wrong, just pause the speech (if the program lets you), and make the relevent change in the article. Repeat until you've heard the whole thing, and save the changes to the article. Of course, the choice of program makes a difference. The way some programs pronounce some words could make them sound wrong, even if they are correct, but a quick check of the text should resolve the issue.

For a list of speech synthesis programs, see the article on speech synthesis. I've had good experience with Etriloquist, however I haven't really tried any others.

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 Listened to the article text with a speech synthesizer, and eliminated some errors You can help!)