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.

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.

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.

In the past months we have been adding speech to the online courses of a number of players in the e-learning space. Here are 5 benefits for e-learning organizations that want to add online text to speech to their educational content:

1. Increase the accessibility of online content for students with cognitive issues, learning disabilities, and vision problems, as well as students whose native language is not the language of the e-learning content.
2. Offer dual-mode content delivery (simultaneous text highlighting while it is read), which increases student retention,comprehension, and memory.
3. Foster academic achievement by letting students customize course delivery to their individual learning styles.
4. Enabling learners to listen to specific educational material such as math courses and online math content.
5. Provide multitasking opportunities for students and portability of content to other devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

How do you make your online courses available to a maximum number of students? Contact us to find out how we can help you add speech to your course material.

Photo Credit: algogenius

Although text-to-speech technology has made a lot of progress, it can sometimes stumble on certain terms such as acronyms, abbreviations, date formats or number representations to name a few. We have some customers where the pronunciation needs fine-tuning such as in the pharmaceutical sector for example where it is even more important that each term is perfectly well read.

Every account that we open comes with a specific dictionary for the customer. We provide a service to each of our customers that helps them with pronunciation issues when they exist. Some of the pronunciation corrections will only be relevant to the dictionary of a particular customer, but in some instances the corrections can also be used for the default dictionary and benefit our entire customer base. We have a very knowledgeable network of linguists that can help our customers in many parts of the world when they encounter pronunciation difficulties.

We have prepared a few online text to speech demos that show the before and after effect of our work on some types of words that can get mispronounced by speech synthesis.

Photo Credit: Jim Linwood

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.

photo credit: ryPix

We get requests for speech-enabling web sites and mobile apps from all different kinds of places. To cope with these demands we offer a large (and growing) panel of languages and voices available for the text to speech online requirements of our customers.

• To date we propose 35 languages and 88 voices!
• There is a big majority of female voices with 54 of them versus 34 male voices.
• The most represented language in terms of voices is the English one with a total of 13 voices (6 US English voices, 5 UK English voices, 1 Scottish English voice and 1 Australian English voice)) followed by Spanish with 7 voices (4 Spanish Castilian, 3 Spanish American), Dutch with 7 voices, French and German with 5 voices each.
• Did you know that we propose 2 variants of Norwegian: Bokmål (used by 85 to 90% of the Norwegian population) and Nynorsk.
• Apart from Spanish, we also have available Catalan, Valencian, Galician and Basque. Did you know that in the Catalan, Balearic Islands, Valencian, Basque, Navarra and Galician areas of Spain, only a part of the population is Spanish speaking only.
• If you have web sites and/or mobiles apps in Arabic, we can provide you with a choice of 4 voices (2 female and 2 male). We also have 3 Turkish voices. Did you know that the earliest known Arabic texts go back to the 8th century BC.
• For web sites in Eastern Europe (as defined per the United Nations), we cover Czech, Romanian, Polish and Russian.
• Did you know that we also propose Faroese and Finland Swedish. The latter is a combination of Swedish dialects spoken by Swedish-speaking Finnish in Finland.
• We also have Welsh known as Cymraeg in its native writing.
• Did you know that as many as 15% words differ between Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, 2 languages that we also have in our portfolio.