Well before my time on Steem, in early 2018, Hive account@tts launched a text-to-speech service. You have probably come across the comment (somewhat random though) that says this:

To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.

The links do work and you are presented with an mp3 file of a female (with American accent) reading out the post to you. Their introduction post seemed like it was received well but as time rolled on, people just ended up getting frustrated at seeing it on-every-one-of-their-posts.

OK, you get the point. The problem here is not the fact that it's not a useful service, it's due to the fact that it's randomly converting the posts to speech. It's not giving the content creator or consumer the option to do so, on-demand. It seems like the community wanted this feature:

So (drumroll please...!), I present to you...

Hive account@tts.reloaded - text to speech on demand

Hive account@tts.reloaded is a bot that I created that converts text-to-speech on demand. And the best thing is:

It won't spam your posts...you control if and when you want it converted.

Here's how it works:

Comment with $tts under any post you want converted text to speech.
Hive account@tts.reloaded will come in (hopefully!) with a comment and a download link.
For now, the voice is an Australian male (I'm from Australia, so it makes sense right?).

Here's a comparison I did on a recent post:

How you can help support this project

I run the witness Hive account@untersatz with Hive account@organduo. Casting a witness vote would help us subsidise our running and development costs. At the present time (in this alpha state), we won't be charging for the service but it will be monitored for "fair and acceptable use". We will happily accept any donations though :)