Hope the Mother’s Day Weekend was all you wanted. I miss my parents everyday of the year.

Have you ever come across a product that you hoped would live up to the hype, the technology would be advanced enough to give you the level of satisfaction you seek?

Recently I thought I found something that would be a tremendous way to promote the new speaking/writing course Painting My Room In A Colorful Way. It’s a software that converts text from an article to a video.

There is some work involved and it isn’t as user friendly as it should be but if it had made the grade of at least a B+ I could overlook the imperfections. The short story on the inner workings is you take an article and paste the title and the text into the appropriate boxes. You can upload a photo if you would like or use one of their stock images. You have the opportunity to upload audio or use one of their files. They offer different type of backgrounds and fonts but not font sizes (that is one of the many facets that needs improving).

Once you have pasted the text in the box you are forced to make the words separate paragraphs regardless of how you feel about this. Each paragraph gives you the opportunity to use 1 of 8 voices (4 female and 4 male). An imperfection that came up right away was sometimes only one voice would work. Other times all eight could be selected but a few sounded overly robotic.

The text must all be in English and the software doesn’t understand ” or ‘ so you have to make sure to remove those before getting into the final phases. Another surprising failure is at times a basic word is not understood. If you could imagine my surprise when “Dog” freaked out the system. None of the voices understood the word but could read circumvent or superlative.

There were times I had to close out of the software because the voices picked up completely unrelated gibberish. Instead of reading the text a series of numbers that had nothing to do with the article were being articulated.

The overall start to finish time is about 3 minutes per article but it would be far better to be 10 and have the error rate go down considerably.

My first inclination and using the product only enhanced my view is that it was released too soon. There are so many issues that could use tweaking. At the very end of the video the author’s information is shown in such small font Superman couldn’t read it with X-Ray vision. The eight voices are not recorded at the same level so there is not a consistent tone throughout the presentation.

I have a link to a video I uploaded and the result isn’t bad but it is only because as a former disc-jockey and somebody that has been around audio/video forever I was able to use some tricks of the trade.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geUgs-pDTjM

Thanks for your time and enjoy the day.



Craig Fenton is the creator of Painting My Room In A Colorful Way (the ultimate speaking and writing course with written, audio, and phone coaching). He is the author of the Jefferson Airplane book Take Me To A Circus Tent and the Jefferson Starship Have You Seen The Stars Tonite. Craig lectures with a one time member of the Grateful Dead and a legendary American Rock & Roll Photographer.

http://www.learnpublicspeakingskills.com