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.

photo credit: whatleydude

Customers ask us to give them relevant reasons for why they should add online text to speech to their web sites, mobile sites or mobile apps. Here are 5 important ones:

1. Don’t leave some of your users behind. Online text to speech helps those of your visitors with reading problems access your text content. Moreover, since no downloads are required, users just click & listen to listen to your content.
2. Make your text content usable in situations where reading is not an easy option. Put yourself in your users’ shoes when for example they want to access your text content on small mobile screens in a packed train while commuting to work.
3. If you are in the eLearning space, adding online text to speech helps learners better understand and memorize your learning material. And as in point 2, you can get your learners to listen to your content wherever they are and whenever they want.
4. In a world which increasingly asks us to multi-task, listening to your online content helps your users engage in other activities in parallel.
5. The frequency of creating text content online is exploding. Online text to speech gives you the opportunity to automatically create an audio channel of your text thereby increasing the value of your content creation process.

Contact us if you want to find out more about online text to speech.