We’ve just published a report that summarizes some of research-supported benefits of bimodal content presentation. Content is presented bimodally when it is in both audio and visual formats at the same time.  Bimodal reading refers to the act of reading text while hearing the words at the same time or reading the text, hearing the words, and having the words (and/or sentences) highlighted at the same time.

ReadSpeaker online text-to-speech solutions make it easy to present your online content bimodally. The end-user needs only to click the Listen button to hear the text while he reads it. Our products can also highlight the text at the same time either word by word or sentence by sentence.

The research shows that using text to speech can improve the end-user’s

• word recognition skills and vocabulary
• reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and concentration
• information recall and learning/memory enhancement

When using text to speech, the end-user can also feel more motivated and have a more positive attitude with regard to reading.

Download the report or get a demo of your own site presented bimodally.

Adding speech as a service to a website, mobile site or app, is a decision that the content owner takes for several reasons such as:

• A new and easy way for their users to access online content
• An innovative way to interact with online text content
• Enhanced usability
• An easier access to text content for users with reading disabilities
• Corporate social responsibility
• Reaching out to a greater number of users
• Delivering audio information to multiple platforms and devices

Usage will vary depending on who the content owner targets, how the service is implemented and communicated about. In terms of implementation, many different parameters can be modified such as what part of the content should be read, the design and placement of the player, the speed, pitch, volume and order of reading, if the text should be highlighted while it is being read, and more. Content owners find it useful to be able to customize how they want the audio version of their online text to be played out.

Let us know what you are looking for when considering speech as a service for your online content.

The BovenIJ hospital is a general basic hospital based in Amsterdam North. One of the things that makes BovenIJ a nice hospital is its personal attention to each patient. BovenIJ hospital was the first Dutch care institution. In order to provide better services for its international patients and visitors, BovenIJ publishes its website in four languages: Dutch, English, Turkish, and Arabic. We recently interviewed Angelina Hammond of the BovenIJ  Communications Department on how the hospital benefits from ReadSpeaker online text-to-speech solutions.

Q. Why did you decide to speech-enable your website?
A. Our hospital deals with patients of different cultures. The district in which we are situated is also very multicultural. It’s no more than a logical decision to give the information in different languages, but also make it available for the illiterate. Our Consumers’ Consultative Council, which we call ‘Cliëntenraad’, also played an important part in the final decision to speech-enable our website.

Q. How did you learn about ReadSpeaker and its solutions?
A. One colleague did a lot research on Internet, so she came across this application and its solutions.

Q. How much effort was involved to add ReadSpeaker to your website?
A. We needed some support to add ReadSpeaker. Of course, this was also a special case because it involved four different languages.

Q. How have you benefited from having a talking website?
A. We have been able to provide extra service to the outside world. We’ve received many compliments about this service.

Q. How satisfied are your website visitors with the ReadSpeaker listen feature?
A. Very satisfied!

Q. Would you recommend other hospitals to add ReadSpeaker to their website?
A. Yes, absolutely.

Q. Do you have any additional feedback about ReadSpeaker?
A. Every organization or firm should have such a tool to reach even more clients or different sections of the public.

Posted by Teresa Citro, CEO Learning Disabilities Worldwide (LDW)

The team at ReadSpeaker kindly offered me to present what we do at LDW. Learning Disabilities Worldwide, established in 1965, is an international professional organization dedicated to improving the educational, professional, and personal outcomes for individuals with learning disabilities (LD) and other related disorders. Our members include world-renowned experts and scholars, preservice teachers, general education teachers, special education teachers, paraprofessionals, team coaches, clinicians, consultants, administrators, medical and mental health professionals, individuals with learning disabilities, and their parents and families.

Learning Disabilities Worldwide publishes two peer-reviewed, scientifically-based journals that are multidisciplinary in nature focusing on empirical studies, reviews of the literature, policy issues, and advocacy relevant to the field of learning disabilities. We continue to engage in the professional development and dissemination of scholarly works and evidence-based practices to promote and enhance the success of all individuals with learning disabilities. We provide a unique opportunity for academic scholars, both in the United States and abroad, to exchange ideas and research opportunities to better the quality of life for individuals with learning disabilities around the world. We also work to enhance the lives of individuals with learning disabilities and their families through its publications, website, and conferences.

We are always looking for new and useful ways to make our online content as easy to access as possible and that is how we found ReadSpeaker’s text to speech online service. Our website, www.ldworldwide.org, uses ReadSpeaker Embedded Highlighting in English and 10 additional languages as well as ReadSpeaker docReader, so that our users may access our web pages and online documents through visual and auditory means. By providing this service, our website becomes more accessible and usable to those with disabilities. Through this service, ReadSpeaker helps Learning Disabilities Worldwide improve the lives of individuals with learning disabilities, their families, and the professionals in their lives.

Carlo Revelli, the founder of the leading French citizen and participatory journal AgoraVox shared some of his feedback on how he sees speech as a service.

Q. AgoraVox has speech-enabled its web site since a few years, why did you do this?

A. We wanted a simple solution for our web site users, notably those with reading disabilities. ReadSpeaker came across as the most useful web application, where visitors simply need to click on the listen buttons that go along with each of our articles to access the spoken version. Our users can also download the mp3 file to listen to our content at a later time or on mobile devices.

Q. A question we often get is how can this not be a pre-recorded voice? How would you explain that it isn’t to a prospective customer?

A. Well, the audio version is generated on-the-fly thanks to text to speech online which is near-to-human in quality. This is what makes ReadSpeaker so useful for a media site such as AgoraVox. Our contributors are constantly updating the site and the vocal version is generated dynamically in real-time.

Q. In terms of adding ReadSpeaker to your site, how difficult was it?

A. It’s as easy as adding a web analytics solution such as Google Analytics. You only need to tag your site with the code delivered by ReadSpeaker and off you go; you have a speaking web site! It takes half-a-day at the most.

We often get asked about what are good examples of web sites implementing text to speech online. Not all but many follow our guidelines on how to place the listen button. That is paramount in making sure that the user immediately recognizes what the listen button on the web page is meant for. Here is a selection of a couple of web sites that display ReadSpeaker in a way that ensures a good user experience.

Preston City Council

Preston City Council uses one of the many versions of our listen button to specify that the button will read the page (we also have buttons in many sizes and colors that specify that the user will Listen to text, Listen to post, Listen to article, or just the listen icon on its own). The Listen button is placed near the text that it reads out.

Australian Government

The Australian Government’s web site concerning disability, housing and community services implemented our reading service with embedded highlighting with the listen link next to the title of the page.

They also have a page for their web site visitors explaining how the listen function works.

WhoAWee Knowledge Center

This is an elearning site for kids. The listen button sits very visibly just above the text that it reads out.

Upplands-Bro Kommun

The Swedish web site Upplands-Bro Kommun has the listen button (Lyssna) sitting just under the title so that users can immediately identify the purpose that the button serves. This townhall also has an explanatory page for its users on how to use the listen feature.

Annecy Townhall

The French town of Annecy is one of the 3 contenders for the Winter Olypics in 2018. They have placed a big listen button (Ecouter la page) next to the title.

As with all our implementations, once the user clicks on these listen button, the speech starts automatically without having to download any software or plugin.

We can make demos of how a listen button would look on your web site and advise you on the best practices so that your users can get the most out of an audio version of your text content.

Being in contact with thousands of prospects and customers, we compiled some of the most frequent questions we get on speech as a service.

How does ReadSpeaker work?

This is a generic question that has multiple answers since ReadSpeaker has a variety of different online text to speech reading solutions. For our most used solutions which are for reading web pages out loud, ReadSpeaker is a hosted service which enables web site owners to tag their web site with our code. This is similar to tagging a web site with tracking code such as Google Analytics for example. Once our code has been implemented, end users simply click on the listen button to start enjoying the speech-enabled version of your web site or mobile app. ReadSpeaker uses the latest text to speech technologies to achieve this.

Do my users have to download anything to get ReadSpeaker to work?

No, your users do not have to download anything to be able to use ReadSpeaker. What the user needs is a computer or another device such as a smartphone with Internet connection to be able to listen to your content. The user simply clicks and listens to hear what you have to say.

Does ReadSpeaker work on HTTPS sites and password protected sites?

Yes, ReadSpeaker can be set up in such a way as to speech-enable secure sites and password protected sites.

I have a Content Management System (CMS). Can ReadSpeaker easily be integrated into our CMS?

Our customers work with dozens of different content management systems and have never encountered any particular problems integrating our code within their templates. For certain content management systems we have even developed plugins to facilitate even further the ease of implementation.

How many languages can I have my web site read in?

ReadSpeaker to date can speech-enable web sites and mobile apps in 35 languages and 88 voices since we have several female and male voices for most of the 35 languages. The underlying text of your web site must be in the language that you want to have it read out loud in.

What happens if some of my content is not well pronounced?

We can create customized dictionaries (some of our solutions have that per default) so as to take into account some words that are specific to your industry jargon and that are not well read. This sometimes happens with acronyms and abbreviations for example. We can then work on your customized dictionary to have your words pronounced correctly.

How do I know how many times users have listened to my web site or mobile app?

ReadSpeaker keeps track of how many times the listen button has been clicked on per day and on which pages of your web site or mobile app. You can view your statistics in your customer portal account on a per day or month basis.

Where do you suggest we put the listen button?

We recommend that our listen button should be close to the content and the heading so that there is an immediate mental link between the content that is read out and the listen button that is displayed.

Do we have to use your listen button?

For usability and awareness reasons we introduced a unified icon to identify that a web site is equipped with a ReadSpeaker web reading service. When website visitors see this icon, they learn what happens if the icon is clicked; the page will be read out loud to them. We propose a variety of buttons in the different languages we support and with many color and size options.  Of course you can also design and use your own button if ours doesn’t fit in with the look and feel of your site.

If you want to find out more about our speech as a service solutions, you can also contact us directly.

The Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) has just upgraded its new iPhone app. Amongst the new features is the capacity for users to now listen to the content. FTD used our ReadSpeaker® audioMobile™ API solution to this effect. The online text to speech feature is available for the subscription version of FTD’s iPhone app.

As you see in the screenshot hereunder the listen button (Artikel vorlesen) is placed prominently above the article so as to facilitate ease of use by simply tapping on it to start listening to it.

When prospects first get to know about online text to speech and how it can help them, we often get asked by them how difficult it is to speech-enable a web site or mobile app. That is a normal and healthy (!) question to ask and the underlying reasons for asking it are essentially what kind of support will you give me if things go wrong, or I don’t understand how your solutions work, or how long will it take or any kind of question that might arise  when dealing with a new product or service. We want every single one of our customers to feel that they can rely 100% on our Support capabilities so that they don’t need to worry about any questions they might have.

Our support team is based in Uppsala in Sweden and they support by email and phone our customers based in over 30 countries ranging from Oman to Singapore, Tunisia to Sweden, Brazil to Canada, Mexico to Switzerland, US to France and more!

We have 5 different kinds of support:

• Pre-sales support
• Implementation support
• Linguistic support
• Development support
• Internal support

Here is how each typically works:

• Pre-sales support: First level of support is carried out by our Sales teams answering questions like how do you implement ReadSpeaker  and how long does it take. This also often includes creating demos on a web page of the prospect so that he/she can see how it works and share it internally with other colleagues involved in the buying process. When needed, our Sales team gets help from our Support team to create these demos as well.
• Implementation support: Once the prospect is interested in going further, our Support team will then take over and either create a test account or, if an order has been signed, by setting up the definite account according to the customer’s requests and giving access to our online implementation instructions. During the implementation phase, our Support is there to answer any questions that might arise and get back to the customer with timely answers and solutions until the implementation has gone live. Support is also there to assist customers in any maintenance or any evolutions (like upgrades, additional implementations) on a constant basis.
• Linguistic support: One of the useful features of ReadSpeaker is that each customer has its own dictionary. That concretely means that we can adapt the pronunciation of words, acronyms, abbreviations for each one of our customers thereby providing them with as close as perfect reading of their industry specific jargon (think pharmaceutical terms here!). This is where our linguists come in to help our customers when needed.
• Development support: When the customer asks for something out-of-the-box solutions we offer, then our development team will be involved to tweak our existing services or in some cases come up with new ways in implementing online text to speech on our customers’ web sites and mobile apps.
• Internal support: There is a lot of internal communication between the Sales team and Support on technical or linguistic related questions which involves constant internal support.

We recently asked a panel of our customers in Europe, the US and the rest of the world some questions on support and technical related elements. Here are the main findings:

• How was it to understand the implementation instructions (very difficult, difficult, ok, easy, very easy): overall we had a majority of ok to very easy in terms of comprehension of our implementation instructions by our customers.
• How was the product to implement (very difficult, difficult, ok, easy, very easy): here we had a majority of easy to very easy
• How was the response time from the support staff (very slow, slow, ok, fast, very fast): We got rated mostly fast on this question.
• How was the quality of the assistance you received from the support staff (very bad, bad, ok, good, very good): good to very good

We really value the level of support we give to our prospects and customers. When things go wrong, we just don’t say “we’re sorry” but we act on it as soon as we can to get to a satisfactory solution. Our best viral marketing is how well our customers think of our Support and that is why it is so central to ReadSpeaker.