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.

Comscore published a report back in September 2010 about smartphone use in 5 European countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain). Within the different data, there is an interesting review of mobile consumption behaviours and device penetration for these five EU countries.

Amongst the different consumptions, accessing news and information represents almost 30% on average for the 5 countries. That is quite a high percentage and reveals that many mobile users are accessing text rich information (for some part at least) of this type of content. With some operators like T-Mobile actually cutting down on data usage allowances due to demand outstripping capacity, the use of light data allowance such as text content is becoming important in the context of this spare capacity.

However, many users need an alternative to accessing text on small sized mobile screens. Online text to speech solutions like ours solve that problem because the data allowance that is needed to convert the text into sound is on the low side. Then there is also the option for customers integrating online text to speech to opt for lower sound qualities to further decrease the bandwidth needed.

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.

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.

We have decided to discontinue the ReadSpeaker AudioFeed service since we are now proposing alternative services.  AudioFeed will be closed down on May 17. So for those of you who have that product please remove any links to the AudioFeed prior to that date.

Other solutions that we now offer for making your blog talk are the ReadSpeaker webReader service that adds Listen buttons to your blog posts. There are both free (advertisement sponsored) and low cost subscription based alternatives.

For automatic podcast production we have our product ReadSpeaker podCaster.

We also propose a free iPhone app called ”ReadSpeaker audioMob Personal” where you can listen to up to three RSS feeds directly on your Apple iPhone/Touch, or you can recommend your readers to download this app and subscribe to your RSS feed. The ReadSpeaker audioMob Personal is only available in English. Locate it on the App Store by searching for “audioMob Personal” or by going to the iTunes preview page.

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.

Haiti earthquake survivor Dan Woolley used an iPhone app called Phone Aid to heal his injuries while he was stuck under the shambles of the hotel he was staying at. The app uses screenshots and speech to give emergency instructions. This is an example of how speech can help users better understand the content they are trying to access. In this particular case, the speech component was particularly useful in conveying essential information in the tragic surroundings the survivor was trapped in.

We’ve just launched our latest app, ReadSpeaker audioMob Personal, for anyone with an iPhone/iPod Touch who wants to listen to the RSS feeds of English text blogs and web sites. ReadSpeaker audioMob Personal enables you to listen as well as view the text content of the text-feeds that come with blogs. The app comes free and enables users to listen to up to 3 English text RSS feeds of their choice.

With ReadSpeaker audioMob Personal you can:

• Browse articles while listening to other items by using the next and previous control buttons
• A setting to play all feed items automatically one after the other or manually
• Navigate using the touch screen to listen to a specific news

Due to the inherent size of the iPhone/iPod Touch screens and the use of these in situations where you are on the go such as travelling, commuting, or exercising, being able to listen to the text-feed content of blogs and web sites provides you with a convenient and easy-to-use alternative to just reading. You don’t need to synchronize your iPhone/iPod Touch to listen to your selected feeds, these are updated automatically and on-the-fly directly to your ReadSpeaker audioMob Personal app!

The app can be downloaded directly on your iPhone/iPod Touch through the App Store on your iPhone/iPod Touch (search for “audioMob”) or from the App Store using Apple’s iTunes software or directly from here. You can also visit the app’s home page giving you more information, instructions and FAQs on ReadSpeaker audioMob Personal.