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.

photo credit: Jamiesrabbits

One of the key elements in text to speech online is to have the web site or mobile app render the reading out of the text to a near faultless experience. We work with default dictionaries as well as dictionaries that are customer specific. In some cases, industry jargon (think the pharmaceutical industry here) can have very specific words that the default dictionary will not always correctly read out. That is where we provide a service which helps our customers enrich their own dictionaries with the corrected pronunciations. If the term is generic, the corrections then also get added to the default dictionary. Here is how the process typically works.

The customer reports mispronounced words/phrases using our pronunciation sheet, where they:

• fill in how and what it is that is mispronounced;
• a description of how it should be pronounced;
• the context where the mispronunciation occurs;
• and an URL to where the mispronunciation occurs (quite often the mispronunciation are due to the context or the HTML code).

We then use the information we get to make corrections to the HTML code or to a specific word. If it is indeed a word itself that is mispronounced we make phonetic transcriptions using different phonetic notations that represent the International Phonetic Alphabet. The notations can for example be X-SAMPA or Kirschenbaum. The corrections are made in our default or customer specific dictionaries were we make search and replace patterns using regular expressions.

Customers sometimes ask us if our text to speech online solutions pre-record the audio version of the text that is speech-enabled. The answer is that our products don’t pre-record anything, the audio we generate is done on-the-fly. This enables ReadSpeaker to convert text into speech on any dynamic web site. We have different products, so I’ll discuss implementation of our most popular one, ReadSpeaker Embedded Highlighting. There are basically 3 steps:

1. Add a short JavaScript to your website code
2. Add our Listen button using the HTML code we provide. We include recommendations in our implementation instructions on how to place the listen button
3. Define the reading area of your web site by either specifying the content to be read out using the HTML ID attribute or by using HTML start and stop comments

Apart from these 3 basic steps, we also include in our instructions a ready-made template for each of our text to speech online solutions which you can use on your web site to explain to your users how to use the listen function. We also provide information on how to name the mp3 file for users who want to save the mp3 file (for example if they don’t have flash) and other recommendations to customize the reading out loud of your web pages.

One you have implemented the above steps, the end-result is:

1. The user visits your site
2. He/she clicks on the listen button; ReadSpeaker detects the page/text
3. ReadSpeaker collects the text and produces the speech
4. …and sends the audio to the user

This process only takes a fraction of a second and doesn’t require the end user to download any software or plugin to be able to listen to your web site.



In every account we open, customers have access to our player wizard. This wizard is an aid for appearance adjustments of the ReadSpeaker flash player. There are many options which can be customized as you wish for the best possible integration into your web site:

• Size
• Attributes such as skins, normal or mini player, combined play/pause button, roll-over tips, volume bar, progress bar text, animated stripes, time format
• Colors: 19 different elements can be changed such as the buttons background, the bar, the loading bar, the volume control bar, the player background, etc

Let’s have a look at how it works. Here is the default player that appears in step 1 of our wizard:

You can then decide to change the size by inputting values for the width and height:

Then you can play on a number of attribute combinations:

And finally you can change the color settings:

For example, let’s say you wanted your web site to display a flash player of bigger width and height, with a rounded skin, where the volume bar is hidden and where the buttons background, bar, and player background colors are of value 0xCCFF66, then your player would look like this:

Let’s imagine you have space constraints and want to try the mini player option instead, with a faded skin and with another color option, then the result would look like this:

As you can see, hundreds of different combinations are available so as to display our player in the most appropriate way in your web site. A last point, our default flash player gets displayed in HTML 5 when your web site is being accessed from an iOS device such as an iPhone or iPad.

Web site owners can now also use our online text to speech solution ReadSpeaker Expanding Player with Embedded Highlighting on Mobile Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Our new solution uses an HTML5 player per default to render the sound. Having both the text read out to you and highlighted is of great comfort to better understand what is being displayed on smaller screens.

When you click on the Settings link within the HTML5 Player area, you can also then choose if you want the highlighting option to be on a word per word and/or sentence basis or if you don’t want any highlighting. You can also adapt the speed of the reading.

Another important feature, when using a computer web browser to access a ReadSpeaker speech-enabled web site, is that when someone selects text and then clicks on the nearby listen button which shows up, a new mini player will appear providing immediate access to the listen function.

Other features that the Embedded Highlighting add-on offers are:

• Updated HTML code in the player which consists of 100% valid elements according to W3C’s recommendations.
• Improved highlighting engine which highlights words and/or sentences even better than in the previous version.
• Support for reading dynamic generated content, such as AJAX or Javascript, can easily be switched on.
• Auto detection and support for HTTPS web sites.
• Support for multiple players on the same page.
• More stable style sheets that do not conflict with websites’ existing CSS.
• New mechanisms that make it easier to customize default behavior and appearance.

Italy’s leading newspaper has added some of our ReadSpeaker products to its web site and iPhone app.

Corriere della Sera’s web site is speech-enabled using our ReadSpeaker Expanding Player with the Embedded Highlighting add-on. The embedded highlighting feature reinforces a better understanding of the text being read. This is done without the need for downloading and installing additional programs.

For their iPhone app, Corriere della Sera used our ReadSpeaker audioMob product to easily add a speech function to its articles (see the headphone icon on the screenshot).

For people that are on the go such as commuting to work or travelling, that don’t have enough time to read, or prefer to listen to an article rather than reading it, the iPhone app listen function is a new, useful way to access information. It overcomes the problem of reading from a small screen.

We are very excited at VoiceCorp about this new addition to our customer base.

VoiceCorp are happy to announce the release of a plug-in for ReadSpeaker Enterprise services for the WordPress publishing platform. More and more companies as well as media organizations use the WordPress platform to create websites and blogs. The platform is easy to use as well as it is easy to customize and maintain. With this new plug-in, the ReadSpeaker Enterprise Expanding Player is implemented in no time and with just the click of a few buttons. The plug-in adds a Listen-button to each blog post and enables the visitor to listen to each post/article. It works pretty much like the Listen function on this blog (which is also built on the WordPress platform). With ReadSpeaker Enterprise, the customer can also customize the user experience by having a selection of many different languages and voices.

As the initiators of the market for speech-enabling web sites with our ReadSpeaker products, we have come across many different reasons amongst our 3000+ customer web sites for giving their online text content a voice using our server side solution.  Here is a list of the 10 main reasons which come back most often from our customers :

1.    It helps certain users get better access to our web site, notably all those that have different reading handicaps such as dyslexia or a certain degree of visual impairment.
2.    It is a great comfort tool for users who spend long periods of time in front of their computer or mobile phone and who appreciate listening to a web page to ease the strain of reading text.
3.    It is a very easy way for listening to our text wherever our user is and whenever he/she wants to listen. Thanks to the save mp3 feature or the ability to convert RSS feeds into podcasts, our text content is portable to mobile devices like a smartphone or mp3 device.
4.    It is a learning tool that helps our web site visitors whose language is not the same we write our content in better understand by listening to it.
5.    We can reach out to more users, increase the trafic to our web site or blog and at the same time show that we care for those that benefit from listening instead of reading our online content.
6.    It helps our users in multi-task contexts listen to our content while engaging in other activities. This can range from listening to cooking recipes while in front of the stove, to listening to step by step do-it-yourself activities like putting up a new window.
7.    It provides us with the missing link, we can now have our users listen as well as sharing, printing, sending our content.
8.    It immediately and on-the-fly converts our online text content into voice thereby giving us an effortless audio channel that we can propose for free to our followers.
9.    Because of the server-side service proposed by ReadSpeaker, our content can be listened to from any device connected to the Internet, whether from home, at the work place or from any location with Internet connectivity.
10.    Since ReadSpeaker is device independent, we are sure that our visitors can listen to what we have to say whatever hardware they use, from a PC to an Android supported phone but also gaming consoles, interactive Internet-TV systems, Internet kiosks, etc

Following our PDF reading capability for ReadSpeaker proReader that we introduced on May 15, we are now very excited to announce the release of our new highly demanded “Embedded Highlighting” add-on for our ReadSpeaker Enterprise Expanding product. By simply clicking on the Listen button, the website user can see the synchronized highlighting of the text being read either on word by word and/or sentence basis. The user just needs to click on the settings link under the player to choose which highlighting option best suits his/her needs.

When a visitors first land on a web page with the Expanding player, this is what they typically see:

Listen button before it has been clicked on

Then, when the user clicks on the Listen button, the player appears and expands as follows:

Activated Listen button with expanded player

By then clicking on the Settings link, four synchronized highlighting options are available to the user:

Settings choices for synchronized highlighting

Here for example is how the synchronized highlighting looks when the “Word and Sentence” option has been chosen:

Synchronized highlighting of the text by word and sentence

Once the user has selected the synchronized highlighting of his/her choice, a cookie will enable the same setting when the user starts the ReadSpeaker Expaning Player service again.

We see the following advantages for web site owners who wish to propose this add-on to their visitors:

• Enhanced and better comprehension of the text being read out
• Immediate and exact vision on which part of the web page is being read out
• Choice of synchronized highlighting which best fits the user’s needs

And like with all our ReadSpeaker products, the user does not need to download and install special software to use our Expanding Player. In the case where the visitor uses a browser without support for Javascript and can’t play Flash content, we always make sure that the audio can be played so that the text can be read back.

Try the Embedded highlighting add-on now on our web site for example on the ReadSpeaker Enterprise Expanding page by clicking on the Listen button at the top of the page. Remember to click on the Settings link under the player to choose the highlighting option you want to activate.

We have gotten many requests from our different geographical markets and the various industries and services that we sell to regarding this add-on and have worked hard to make this happen. We are very enthusiastic on this new embedded highlighting feature and hope you enjoy it!