How to Turn a Text Document into an Audio or Video File

Mac OSX Leopard and Automator makes it easy for Mac computer users to convert a text file to an audio or video file. This means you anything you can read on your Mac, you can also listen to on your iPod. Commuters and other busy people may find this an invaluable way to save some time reading lengthy documents by multi-tasking.

If you have the Leopard operating system, you are probably familiar with its voice, Alex. Alex is the computer-generated voice that you hear when you enable the voice-over feature that reads text that you highlight on your computer. That is not all it does, however. You can get Alex to read anything on your computer, even the contents of text documents! To try this out, open up any TextEdit document, right click, "select speech," and select "start speaking." Alex will read whatever is in the document. This is an especially handy feature when you are proofreading.

To convert text into an iTunes file, open up the Automator program. Automator is a simple program that lets you easily make your own applications by dragging different predefined actions and variables into a workflow. Just drag the actions "get contents of clipboard" and "convert text to audio" to the workflow. Check "show in workflow" and you will be prompted when the workflow runs for a name and location to save the file. To test your workflow, copy the text you want to convert to audio just like you would to cut and paste and then click run. Automator should make a new iTunes file with Alex voicing your text. If your workflow worked the way you wanted it to, you can save it as an application. That way, you do not even have to open Automator to get the same results.

You can even add this audio to a movie or slideshow with iMovie. You can then publish that movie to Youtube or export it to your computer. You do not have to have any video or anything. Just a title and some pictures will generally work. By doing this, you have access to the audio of your document along with any relevant pictures from anywhere in the world!

Of course, there are some drawbacks to using Automator to voice your text documents. Although Alex is one of the most advanced computer generated voices available, it is still computer generated. It does not sound quite as good as a human voice and it can sometimes stumble over obscure words or proper nouns. Therefore, you may not want to use Alex if you plan on sharing your new audio files with the public. On the other hand, content is content and anything you can do to make more of it is a good thing in the content intensive realm of the internet.