iAudioize: listen to docs and mail on your DAP

Now this looks like a good use for your iPod, Zune, iRiver or digial audio player du jours: iAudioize takes your documents or e-mails and converts them to .mp3 files that you can listen to on the go. As e-mail arrives, it will automatically get converted in the background; for documents, there appears to be a little user intervention in terms of selection. You can always listen to your documentation right on your desktop or notebook, but since the each file is an .mp3 file, you can also transfer the audio practically portable audio device that plays .mp3 files.

I did a quick demo of the service on the Mac (a 118 MB download) and was very impressed by the quality of the voice synthesis. To give you an idea, here’s a small audio conversion of a note I composed to myself to test the service. Not bad, although I wanted to try this with an e-mail and it looks like it only works with Mail on the Mac, not Entourage. For Windows, Outlook and Outlook Express are supported. From a documentation perspective, you can convert Word, RTF, Text and PDF files. You can also demo iAudioize: 10 "trys" for free while the full price is $39.99.