From February 13 to February 15, 2012, we participated at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference of O’Reilly in NYC. O’Reilly’s TOC Conference is where the publishing and tech industries converge, as practitioners and executives from both camps share what they’ve learned from their successes and failures, explore ideas, and join together to navigate publishing’s ongoing transformation. This year’s conference was focused around the rapid technology changes that are facing the education business. The fast acceptance of the tablet as a delivery vehicle of learning content has changed the industry profoundly. Textbooks are morphing into interactive apps, which create a complete different learning experience.  These apps provide a perfect platform for experimental and interactive learning and teaching. I was very impressed with the new interactivity tool provided by Wolfram Alpha for interactive math learning, as was demonstrated in a keynote by Theodor Gray.

The rise of electronic textbooks is impressive, as was showcased by Safari Books Online, whose innovative business model is based on usage and not just on the number of users. Their rapid growth shows that the model is successful and accepted, probably not too dissimilar from the ReadSpeaker model.

The conference’s major theme this year was the rise of big data in ePublishing, from the importance of metadata to the interpretation of usage and interaction data. It has become evident that tagging the content is almost as important as producing the content in the first place, as the task of making it findable has become very important. One of the side effects of creating eContent is the disappearance of pages, which creates a difficulty in sequencing content. Finding specific content becomes even more important (and difficult).

Clearly accessibility continues to play a major role in the conversations about technology development and roadmaps for all major publishers at the conference, especially since the electronic era offers a new dimension to provide that access. Most publishers are engaged in deep conversations of how to do this in the best possible way, especially around their mobile delivery platforms. The ReadSpeaker solution offers several benefits : it guarantees a high level of speech quality/voice regardless of what device, operating system and browser the user happens to use, it delivers exact usage statistics to our clients, it works on-the-fly thereby allowing publishers to change their content at any time, it provides quality control over pronunciations of words that are of extra importance to our customers, the SDK – our audioMobile API – is super light for mobile applications and the packaged solutions for websites or mobile websites offers the same user experience on desktop PC as for mobile/portable devices. This explains the rapid growth of ReadSpeaker technology among the major publishers.

Overall, the conference provides a perfect platform for publishing and technology providers to discuss the further integration of technology into the curriculum delivery and into the teaching methods. All major publishers and providers meet and mingle at the conference and the exhibit floors on Times Square. I am sure however that there is always time to enjoy part of the buzz in the Big Apple when you are there.

Different organizations choose to provide a talking version of their website for different reasons. Some have a true wish to reach out to an audience that may have difficulty reading; they just want to help. Others might want to enable the visitor “on the go” to consume the content when moving from A to B. In the public sector, where the information is really for large target groups that are extremely diverse and where there are requirements to be accessible to them all, a service such as ReadSpeaker makes perfect sense. For online newspapers and other online media sites, the more people who can come to the site and use the content, the more visitors and the more revenue from advertisers.

Some organizations are most interested in the actual return on investment (ROI) and profitability of adding such a service. Organizations that I believe would profit the most (financially) are the eCommerce players. I mean the more people who can shop in your store, the more customers you’ll get and the more money you’ll make. The math is simple. If you had a physical store where the customers needed to climb a steep ladder to get in, you would effectively exclude a lot of potential customers. That could be one reason you simply don’t have store entrances like that. Widen the doors, get a wheelchair ramp for strollers, wheelchairs, and walkers, and everyone can get in and buy stuff! Makes sense in the physical world. But the same goes for eCommerce. You shouldn’t build your e-shop just for people who use a certain web browser and a certain kind of computer. If people want to shop, they should be able to do it from any kind of device anywhere and anytime.

But you can do more! A large percentage of consumers (your potential customers) has some sort of reading difficulty. In that case, it doesn’t matter how device- or browser-independent your website is. Once in, your customers need to be able to read about the products, read comments from other customers, compare different products, or simply read whatever text content is there. A consumer needs to feel secure and confident to click the “add to basket” button. Speech enabling can make all the difference to a lot of people, enabling them to learn about your products, to feel confident, and to buy.

Just as you choose whether to take the wheelchair ramp or the stairs, the choice is yours; you do what is most convenient given the situation.

Contact us to learn more about how you can make a difference as an eCommerce player.

We’re asked all the time if we prerecord audio and play it back when the user clicks the Listen button. Some people even ask if we then keep these recordings available on our server. The answers are no and no. All speech is generated on the fly from your latest content.

The most explicit example of this concept can be seen on media and news websites and mobile apps where content may be added or updated several times a day, hour, or minute.

Why should you add online text to speech to media and news sites or mobile apps?

• It increases the accessibility of your news content for your current readership and attracts new users who appreciate the choice to read or listen to your online content.
• Your content becomes mobile. Giving your mobile users the ability to listen to your news while on the go is a very useful way to deliver content to them.
• You can provide your advertisers with a new audio- and/or banner-based advertising space focused on users who enjoy audio content.
• It enables automatic redistribution of your written content in audio format.
• Multitaskers appreciate being able to do other things while listening to the news.

What about live coverage? Why should you add online text to speech to live coverage, such as news, sporting events, stocks, tweets, etc.?
The internet is a real-time medium, with more and more content added or updated faster and faster. ReadSpeaker converts live coverage of all types of news into speech on the fly enabling your users to listen to the most up-to-date news and information.

Have a media/news site or mobile app? Contact us to make it talk!

The Spanish National Library just added online text to speech to its online documents. This follows the speech-enabling of its website last October. This is the latest example of how content owners are increasingly looking to customize how they want speech to interact with online text.

The first step is usually for content owners to add speech to their  websites. This can be customized in different ways like:

• What part(s) of a web page should be read
• Adding multiple listen buttons to a web page
• Adding multiple audio versions in terms of languages and voices
• Setting the default speed and pitch of the voice
• Specific pronunciation of certain words
• Design and placement of the audio player
• Rules for how images, tables, links should be read

This is customization at the web page level. Then content owners, like the Spanish National Library, also want to go deeper and provide their users with an audio access to online documents. Document formats like PDF have their own structure and we provide a specific reading and viewing solution to that effect.

Another aspect of customization involves the speech-enabling of forms. This provides end users with a voice service helping them to fill out online forms.

Customers can now adapt how they want online speech services to be integrated to their content.