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.

Mention the digital divide, and most people think it’s all about those with access to computers and the internet and those without. Traditionally, the difference lies between developed countries and undeveloped countries. Within some countries, this divide exists further between urban and rural areas. As time passes and resources and infrastructure change, this divide is reduced. But there are other digital divides that most of us ignore completely or are not even aware exist.

Disabilities - There still exists a huge divide between people without disabilities and those with disabilities in terms of computer and peripheral usability and online accessibility. Disabilities can range from visual impairment to learning disabilities to physical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy.

Digital Literacy – Some people seem to have been born using computers and are able to do anything online, while other do so reluctantly because they lack the skills needed to successfully find their way around. Sometimes this difference can be attributed to a generational divide. Those born after 1980 have pretty much grown up with the internet, while older generations can still remember using typewriters and having no other way to communicate than calling someone (through a landline) or sending letters via the post office.

Devices – Another new digital divide is based on the type of device used to connect to the internet. More and more people use their smartphone or tablet to access the internet instead of a computer. It can be much easier and cheaper to buy a smartphone, thus reducing the more traditional digital divide within even undeveloped countries. Indeed, when there are iPads, iPhones, and Android smartphones/tablets everywhere, we laugh when a friend has only a basic mobile telephone to only call people or send text messages. But even when smart devices are prevalent, another divide comes from the price of accessing the internet. From country to country, there is a large disparity in data plan pricing.

Usage – Finally, there’s the divide in terms of usage. Some people cannot live without being connected, while others simply prefer not to go online if they don’t have to. There can also be a sense of isolation from too much online “living”. Some believe we are no longer connecting offline because we spend so much time online. There is no reason to even leave the house when you can order your groceries and manage your bank accounts online. The very act of going online can also be isolating. Outside of social media and forums, when you visit websites or use online applications, you’re interacting with no one.

There are probably other divides that exist or will arise in the future. As more and more governments, companies, and health care organizations move online, those on the wrong side of the divide should not be left behind.

It’s amazing how much text content gets created every day on the web. Think about all the blog posts, news articles and updates which generate billions of new text each day. Dynamic content brings about enormous volumes of text each second.

Now combine that with how much of this text content gets increasingly accessed from mobile devices. According to Comscore’s report, half of the total U.S. mobile population uses mobile media. The mobile media user population (those who browse the mobile web, access applications, or download content) grew 19 percent in the past year to more than 116 million people at the end of August 2011.

The problems with reading text from mobile devices for users are that:

• They can’t engage in other activities or tasks while reading
• They might have reading disabilities that keep them from accessing the written content
• The level of comfort offered by smaller screens is not always adequate

Having an online text to speech feature solves those problems and enables content owners to distribute their text on the fly into audio. The speech-enabling of the content that is displayed on mobile devices also increases the value of the text since it has both a written and audio output.

Contact us if you want to find out more about how you can unmute your online text 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.

Amongst the number of customization possibilities offered by ReadSpeaker online text to speech solutions, the ability to switch languages and/or voices can be useful in a number of situations:

• Some websites mix different languages within a same page.
• In some cases, you might want to distinguish a quote from the rest of the text in your web page by allocating a different voice to speech-enable the quote.
• You have a web page where both genders are quoted and therefore need to have female and male voices.
• A combination of the above points.

You can test our automatic language switch demo and our automatic voice switch demo to see how this works.

Contact us if you want a free online text to speech demo of how these automatic voice and language switches work on your own web site.

This might sound like a shampoo & conditioner ad but it describes the “ReadSpeaker effect”. By adding a text-to-speech layer to your online content you are effectively providing an audio channel on top of your text content. Once you have ReadSpeaker on your web site, then you have an automatic and on-the-fly talking web site.

What are the advantages of providing an audio version of your online text content:

• Choice – you are providing a greater choice to your visitors on how they can consume your content.
• Equal access – you are reducing the digital divide by allowing users with different reading disabilities to access your  written content.
• Convenience – visitors to your web site or mobile app can listen while they are on the go, for example commuting to work, thereby making your content more convenient to access.
• Learning – if you propose content for learning purposes, having it in audio format reinforces the learning experience by enabling users to listen to your educational content on-the-fly or by saving the mp3 file for later consumption.
• Availability – an audio version of your web site or mobile app is always there for your visitors to use with the simple click & listen feature of our web based solutions.

Photo credit : takot

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.