New Audio Feature: You Can Now LISTEN to Novus Ordo Watch Articles

Adding text-to-speech functionality…

New Audio Feature:
You Can Now LISTEN to Novus Ordo Watch Articles

We are happy to announce that we have just added text-to-speech functionality to our web site. This means that from now on, pretty much all the written content on Novus Ordo Watch can be listened to at the push of a button.

While this feature may not be relevant to every visitor of the site, it will surely be of great help to those who have more time to listen to content (for example, while driving) than to read it; and of course anyone who is sight-impaired will no doubt also appreciate having this option.

The audio functionality is provided by WebsiteVoice and comes with some bells and whistles. Not only does the tool provide an audio version of any given page or post, it also offers the ability to slow down or speed up the reading of the text, and the entire audio can even be downloaded with a simple click for offline listening later.

How to use the WebsiteVoice text-to-speech functionality? Simply click on the big green speaker icon on the left near the top of the page you are visiting:

(The icon may be smaller and look a little different on a mobile device.)

Here is an example of where the icon is found on a recent blog post:

After a few moments, you will hear the content of the page being read to you by a male voice in American English, starting from where the icon is positioned. Although it is a computer-generated voice, it sounds fairly natural.

As the audio plays, at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen you will find a small control interface that allows for rewinding, pausing/resuming, and speeding up or slowing down the narration. Right next to the controls is displayed a download link. Here is a sample screenshot:

Although this new functionality will be available on most pages of this site, it will be disabled where text-to-speech conversion would not be feasible or suitable (for example, on our site index page and our memes page).

Happy reading/listening!