Google Beatbox (opens in new tab)

https://gist.github.com/721253

Load it as a bookmarklet using this:

javascript:(function(){document.body.appendChild(document.createElement("script")).src = "https://gist.github.com/raw/721253/f70c2bdeaed54d9907a448504...

EDIT: the bookmarklet is getting cut off by HN, see the first comment on the gist linked above.

Unfortunately there's a little bit of delay due to loading the sounds but it sort of works.

like .pv pv zk bschkpv zk ds

    say -v cello droid

    mshta vbscript:CreateObject("SAPI.SpVoice").Speak("Hello, Y Combinator")(Window.close)

  say -v joshua Shall we play a game?

    say -v cello foobarfoobarfoobarfo foobarfoofoobarfi

As is shown by the number of upvotes, people don't come to HN to educate themselves. They come here to be awed. Education is a side effect.

(here's one from this week, by the way: http://pudgykitties.tumblr.com/post/1662418075/why)

Google's New approach to China article is #1 atm — http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800

Also, I agree on the poor UI design.

But in any case, assuming this works, which it apparently does, for some, it's a cute idea.

EDIT: Got it working. Are you running Flashblock? I am, and after I put translate.google.com into FB's whitelist, I get audio. When the button is light blue, press it. The button turns dark blue, and the sound plays. When the sound is finished, the button goes back to light blue.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

If you are using OS X, you should be able to use the `say` command to create a recording of a voice speaking a sentence. You could likely take that, pipe it into a file and serve it up in an <audio> tag and play it from javascript that way.

I might try hacking my project to do exactly that. However, I think a sane solution for you would be to make use of system accessibility options or screen readers. The downside there is that you can't call into those from a user's browser.