Produce Your Own Video, Stop the Country’s Decline!
Friday, October 31st, 2008Do you have that stubborn friend who insists on voting for the worst of the two evils? Now you can actually make a difference for your country without actually taking much time or effort to do so! If you want to send a wake-up call to someone who can’t take precious time out of their day to vote, then check out this site. Simply enter their name and e-mail address. They receive a link to a short video of a news report that explains the importance that their vote makes. The Flash video cleverly and seamlessly imports their name into the news report. I was a bit disappointed that the newscaster didn’t actually speak my name however. I’ve already seen Flash sites that use speech synthesis to convert electronic text to audio.
This is just like the talking computer WOPR from the classic movie War Games, just not as cheesy. Microsoft has several products centered on this.
The Microsoft Speech SDK is actually pretty easy to use, if you want to write your own Text To Speech application. This is already built into Vista, simply select the “Ease of Access Center” icon and your computer will start talking. The Narrator program will speak the text you have displayed on your active application. It is highly customizable to support other languages and voices.
News At Seven has done this. They randomly select news stories, and then have a gaming engine render the newscaster. Text to speech makes the newscaster “speak.” You can download a video clip from their site here.
I’m not an ad wizard, but I could see this kind of thing being used as effective advertising. With your own Facebook account, they already know your name and interests. If you are going to display an ad on your site, why not do a Flash advertisement where the actor in the commercial speaks your name? For example: “Ed Hassinger, Gears of War 2 is out now! It is on your Amazon wish list and they have free shipping!”
Now hear this: GO VOTE!








