Interested in listening to cases during your morning commute? How about freshening up your knowledge with chapters from a treatise or hornbook during your afternoon run? When juggling hefty casebooks or attempting to use your iPad on your run is just too much, convert your material to audio and listen on the go!  The KIC Scanners located in the Law Library Copy Room and Microform room not only create high quality scans of the materials you need, but will also convert text to natural language audio. With this feature, you can create scans of cases, listen to them on the go or follow along as you read.

To create text-to-audio simply scan the document using the KIC Scanner or ADF scanner as you normally would. Before saving the file to a flash drive (recommended) or sending it by email be sure to select the “More Output Options…” tab. You’ll notice the option to save your file as a

• Searchable PDF: creates a PDF using OCR (optical character recognition) to create a PDF that is searchable and able to accept highlighting and underlining using a PDF reader

• Quick PDF: this is the default setting; a standard PDF scan

• JPEG / PNG: creates image files for manipulation using a photo editor such as Photoshop or Gimp

• Rich Text: creates a document much like an unformatted Microsoft Word or Notepad document

• Audio: creates an mp3 of the selected text as described in this article.

Once you select the “audio” option the KIC Scanner will open a dialogue box where you can select the body of text you wish to be converted to audio. This option eliminates headnotes, footnotes and page numbers from being read aloud and allows you to focus on the material at hand. After you’ve selected what text should be sourced as audio, simply export the file to a flash drive (recommended) or send it via email for listening later.

The quality of the audio produced is less than Siri but more advanced than Microsoft Sam and hopefully will improve with future builds of the KIC Scanner software. If you cannot get over the voice produced by the KIC Scanner, consider converting scans into “Rich Text” and using a desktop-based audio conversion program such as Natural Reader or many other online text-to-speech services. If you have questions or get stumped, feel free to stop by either the reference or circulation desk and we’ll step in and save the day!