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.

Being in contact with thousands of prospects and customers, we compiled some of the most frequent questions we get on speech as a service.

How does ReadSpeaker work?

This is a generic question that has multiple answers since ReadSpeaker has a variety of different online text to speech reading solutions. For our most used solutions which are for reading web pages out loud, ReadSpeaker is a hosted service which enables web site owners to tag their web site with our code. This is similar to tagging a web site with tracking code such as Google Analytics for example. Once our code has been implemented, end users simply click on the listen button to start enjoying the speech-enabled version of your web site or mobile app. ReadSpeaker uses the latest text to speech technologies to achieve this.

Do my users have to download anything to get ReadSpeaker to work?

No, your users do not have to download anything to be able to use ReadSpeaker. What the user needs is a computer or another device such as a smartphone with Internet connection to be able to listen to your content. The user simply clicks and listens to hear what you have to say.

Does ReadSpeaker work on HTTPS sites and password protected sites?

Yes, ReadSpeaker can be set up in such a way as to speech-enable secure sites and password protected sites.

I have a Content Management System (CMS). Can ReadSpeaker easily be integrated into our CMS?

Our customers work with dozens of different content management systems and have never encountered any particular problems integrating our code within their templates. For certain content management systems we have even developed plugins to facilitate even further the ease of implementation.

How many languages can I have my web site read in?

ReadSpeaker to date can speech-enable web sites and mobile apps in 35 languages and 88 voices since we have several female and male voices for most of the 35 languages. The underlying text of your web site must be in the language that you want to have it read out loud in.

What happens if some of my content is not well pronounced?

We can create customized dictionaries (some of our solutions have that per default) so as to take into account some words that are specific to your industry jargon and that are not well read. This sometimes happens with acronyms and abbreviations for example. We can then work on your customized dictionary to have your words pronounced correctly.

How do I know how many times users have listened to my web site or mobile app?

ReadSpeaker keeps track of how many times the listen button has been clicked on per day and on which pages of your web site or mobile app. You can view your statistics in your customer portal account on a per day or month basis.

Where do you suggest we put the listen button?

We recommend that our listen button should be close to the content and the heading so that there is an immediate mental link between the content that is read out and the listen button that is displayed.

Do we have to use your listen button?

For usability and awareness reasons we introduced a unified icon to identify that a web site is equipped with a ReadSpeaker web reading service. When website visitors see this icon, they learn what happens if the icon is clicked; the page will be read out loud to them. We propose a variety of buttons in the different languages we support and with many color and size options.  Of course you can also design and use your own button if ours doesn’t fit in with the look and feel of your site.

If you want to find out more about our speech as a service solutions, you can also contact us directly.

Software as a Service (SaaS) also known as software on demand is the type of distribution we have chosen since the beginning of ReadSpeaker to deliver our services. It’s really at the core of how we look at making our online text to speech services readily available to our customers in the easiest and most efficient way possible for them. In our case, the software component we deliver is how we convert different online text content found on web sites, mobile sites and apps into speech hence the Speech as a Service.

We have accumulated years of feedback from our customers on delivering speech as a service and here are the most valuable gains we see for them:

• Our customers don’t need to worry about client side installations.
• Our customers also don’t need to worry about local server installation.
• Maximum availability for their end-users who can access the online text to speech version of their web content from any device with an Internet connection.
• System maintenances are included in our services so there again our customers don’t need to worry about backups, updates, security issues.
• We can scale our operations to cope with increasing usage and demand peaks.
• Time to delivery is very quick so our customers can propose a talking version of their Internet content in a matter of hours.
• A subscription model with a fixed price level which facilitates budget planning.
• Agility and flexibility in proposing new features without the need to change the implementation.