In August we are releasing the support for Chinese and Arabic on the ReadSpeaker Enterprise Services platform. Please contact info@voice-corp.com or stay tuned to this blog to hear more about it.

Here at VoiceCorp we’re convinced and obsessed that all web site owners and bloggers benefit from adding an audio version to their online content. So far, we have had a lot of our customers coming from the public arena. That is quite normal since this sector has often the obligation to provide an equal access to their information whether you suffer from a disability or use a mobile device to reach their online content for example. Making their web sites talk helps them achieve this.

But what about the private corporate sector? We are starting to see an evolution here with an increasing amount of household names contacting us and asking us what speech-enabling their web sites could help them achieve. One of the interesting trends here is that some of these companies see an audio version of their web content as part of their overall corporate social responsibility (CSR). Since more and more of their corporate information is published online, these companies are considering the impact that this could have on all those customers, partners, employees that for some reason would prefer to listen to this information rather than reading it. The most recent example of this type of behaviour comes from a world-wide leading luxury and retail group which we are unfortunately not allowed to name. We asked them the straight forward question why they wanted to provide a speaking version of their web site? The answer was not only did they want to make their content as accessible as possible to a maximum amount of visitors to their web site but that this was also part of a bigger general reflection on how they were trying to increase their CSR in all the different aspects of their day-to-day operations. Of course, the more visible parts of a CSR strategy are for example to foster employee volunteering programs or taking part in environmental actions but it is noteworthy to see that the web is now also part of this overall reasoning. At the end of the day, CSR whether it is done offline or online is all about reaching beyond purely business objectives and making the world a better place to live in no?

I have been forced to temporarily shut down the possibility to comment the posts due to large amounts of spam. Hopefully this will be solved very soon.

Niclas