In its latest Internet campaign lasting from May to September, Nestlé Extreme invites French Internet users to win one year of free cinema tickets by creating their own movie trailer. The trailers are produced using different characters, scenes, music, colours and last but not least voice-overs. For the latter, the agencies Creative Syndicate, Unit 9 and JWT Paris used our ReadSpeaker SpeechMachine product to enable website visitors to type in a text that is then converted to speech so as to create the voice-over for the trailer. This is a perfect example of ReadSpeaker SpeechMachine in action and how brands can innovatively use text-to-speech to add a fun audio outlet for their target public to play around with.

Here is how the campaign process looks when the website visitor is asked to input the text to create the voice-over for the trailer:

The movie director asking the candiadates to type in the text

And here is the actual text as it is being written in with the Listen button (Ecouter) at the right:

Image of text being inputted and Listen button

The official Nestlé Extreme trailer is on French television since May 25.

A sausage says more then a thousand words.

Scan, one of the leading Swedish brands just launched a really great viral marketing campaign using VoiceCorps SpeechMachine solution. The idea for the campaign is quite cool. The campaign is for marketing Scan’s new line of spicy sausages. They wanted to add some nice interaction with the user so they added the strongest media around. Speech.

The core functionalty is that the users can send “speech-cards” to each other. They enter the text, listens if it is good and send the speech card to a friend.

The cool thing is that we used a Spanish voice but using Swedish speech rules. The result is a Spanish guy speaking Swedish. It’s brilliant! It really sounds like a guy from Spain that only lived a few years in Sweden. Enough time to learn the language but keeping a strong Spanish accent. The speech solution itself was delivered in just a couple of hours thanks to SpeechMachines ability to integrate with all the TTS engines on the market.

SpeechMachine is provided by VoiceCorp as a 100% hosted service that allows creative web developers to easily add text-to-speech functionality to their web apps without requiring any knowledge about text-to-speech technology. The communication with the customer’s web based app and the SpeechMachine is based on standard HTTP requests, and is therefore really easy to integrate in any web app.

Want to try out the app, http://www.scan.se/kryddigakorvar/