The text to audio widget turns a passage of text into an audio player. Using this the content author can create and edit audio resources easily. Students do not see the text, just the audio player.
Text to Audio
Adding a Text to Audio Widget to a Page
From the widget icon on the Moodle HTML editor toolbar choose "Text to Audio" cloud. If you do not have a widgets icon on the toolbar, Poodll (or Generico) are not fully installed.
Text to Audio Settings
The setting allow you to choose the language and gender of the machine voice. The format refers to the type of content you will pass to be read, either plain text or SSML. SSML is speech synthesis markup language. Read more about that here.
More Information
See here for a brief introduction to using Poodll Widgets.