RegEx and Voice Dream Reader

[Justin Mallone]

I’ve been listening to Elliot’s blog posts using Voice Dream Reader app.

(You can point the app at web pages and save them to the app. Elliot has all his posts on one page here http://curi.us/blog/all)

One annoying thing is that the VDR voice was reading out a lot of URLs which is not fun to listen to.

However, VDR has a pronunciation dictionary (tucked away under the Audio Settings button when you open a file) which you can set to read certain words differently than the default (or skip over them completely). It also supports RegEx, which I never really used but which I remembered from a programming class was supposed to be a SUPER POWERFUL tool for like finding strings in text.

Anyways if you put the following secret sauce in as a dictionary entry in VDR:

https?:\/\/(www\.)?[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%._\+~#=]{2,256}\.[a-z]{2,6}\b([-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]*)

and then set Match to RegEx and set the “pronounced as” to something like “URL” (no quotes), then it’ll find all URLs and read whatever you set in “pronounced as" instead :D :D

(Hat tip to Elliot for actually finding the secret sauce!)

The pronunciation dictionary is app-wide, so this will work throughout.

VDR page gives another example of something you can use it for:

http://www.voicedream.com/release-2-8-create-your-own-reading-experience/

> For example, to skip the chapter-verse numbers in the Bible, you would define a rule to skip RegEx “[0-9]+:[0-9]+”. What you can do with RegEx is limitless.

Another example I just thought of is, lots of PDF book scans have regularly repeating stuff like e.g. the chapter title on alternating pages. So could help with that.

-JM