Following our PDF reading capability for ReadSpeaker proReader that we introduced on May 15, we are now very excited to announce the release of our new highly demanded “Embedded Highlighting” add-on for our ReadSpeaker Enterprise Expanding product. By simply clicking on the Listen button, the website user can see the synchronized highlighting of the text being read either on word by word and/or sentence basis. The user just needs to click on the settings link under the player to choose which highlighting option best suits his/her needs.

When a visitors first land on a web page with the Expanding player, this is what they typically see:

Listen button before it has been clicked on

Then, when the user clicks on the Listen button, the player appears and expands as follows:

Activated Listen button with expanded player

By then clicking on the Settings link, four synchronized highlighting options are available to the user:

Settings choices for synchronized highlighting

Here for example is how the synchronized highlighting looks when the “Word and Sentence” option has been chosen:

Synchronized highlighting of the text by word and sentence

Once the user has selected the synchronized highlighting of his/her choice, a cookie will enable the same setting when the user starts the ReadSpeaker Expaning Player service again.

We see the following advantages for web site owners who wish to propose this add-on to their visitors:

• Enhanced and better comprehension of the text being read out
• Immediate and exact vision on which part of the web page is being read out
• Choice of synchronized highlighting which best fits the user’s needs

And like with all our ReadSpeaker products, the user does not need to download and install special software to use our Expanding Player. In the case where the visitor uses a browser without support for Javascript and can’t play Flash content, we always make sure that the audio can be played so that the text can be read back.

Try the Embedded highlighting add-on now on our web site for example on the ReadSpeaker Enterprise Expanding page by clicking on the Listen button at the top of the page. Remember to click on the Settings link under the player to choose the highlighting option you want to activate.

We have gotten many requests from our different geographical markets and the various industries and services that we sell to regarding this add-on and have worked hard to make this happen. We are very enthusiastic on this new embedded highlighting feature and hope you enjoy it!

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.

We always try and get maximum playability for our different products when it comes to the different devices from which you can listen to web pages and blog posts. We have now just updated the compatibility of how ReadSpeaker webReader can stream the audio on iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch. We have configured our streamers so that they can now perfectly play back the audio for the iPhones and iPod Touch devices. This will help all our ReadSpeaker webReader web site owners and bloggers make their content even more usable for their readers who use an iPhone for example to listen to what they have to say. We have also changed the “Download mp3” under the player to “Play mp3” for those users that don’t have Flash so that they can always save the mp3 to their computer by right clicking on the link and saving the link. We are continually looking at ways to improve how are products are used and hope that this addition will help our growing number of users out there!

We’ve been getting many requests from our ReadSpeaker proReader customers in the past months for PDF support meaning reading out loud PDF files on their web sites. We have now added this new functionality to our ReadSpeaker proReader product. This new feature enables web site owners to expand to PDFs the audio channel of their online content. The PDF reading comes with a set of controls to be used for navigating in the PDF (previous page, next page, first page, last page) as well as a drop-down list where the user can go directly to a selected page within the PDF.

Screenshot of ReadSpeaker proReader

The PDF reading feature nicely complements the existing features that end users can enjoy, namely:

•    Activate the highlighting of the text being spoken and customise how this highlighting should be presented (by word, by phrase, a mix of both or none)
•    Pre-select the part of the text on the web page that should be read out loud
•    Choose the reading speed
•    Show or hide the text as it is being read
•    Change the text size and colour as well as the font face
•    Give feedback notably on any pronunciation improvements

What amazes me in our ReadSpeaker webReader product is its language scope. Here we are every day getting new blogs and web sites signing up in different languages ranging from Italian to Dutch as well as American English, in all 9 languages and 18 voices so far. What is also interesting is the variety of subjects that are covered and that bloggers make available in audio as well.  This ranges from cooking in French to chess playing in Dutch to information on the Appennine region in Italian. One of the reasons for speech-enabling web sites and blogs is also to help foreign-born users listen to text that is not written in their mother-tongue language. Listening to a foreign language is a great way to learn more about the different sounds that make it up and a good learning tool to become more comfortable with it.

When we explain what ReadSpeaker can bring to online content owners, one of the main elements is ease of implementation and of use. Implementing our service on a web site or blog is analog to for example installing Google Analytics. You simply need to copy/paste HTML code to get your web site talking. On the user side, you just need to be connected to the Internet and off you go listening to a speech-enabled web site or blog.

I’m insisting on this facility of usage both from the content owner and user point of views because it brings me to the title of this post. When you refer to printing a web page, the first impression is that of how easy it is to perform such an action. The same could be said of other well distributed goodies such as sharing an article or sending a page. The real innovation we brought to the Internet back in 1999 was the ability to also “print” sound as easily as printing an online text. I must confess that I didn’t coin this impression of printing sound. That was the finding of a well-known tech blogger in France called Fred Cavazza who first discussed this concept in this post (in French).

Printing sound conveys a very appealing image to the ability to simply click on our listen buttons to start listening to the content of a web page. It also, as is the case with printing a page, shows that with ReadSpeaker you can also “carry” along the sound impression. This is the case because you can save the mp3 file of the page you are listening to for use at a later time or on a mobile device. I really like this comparison of ReadSpeaker to printing sound. I find these kind of images often speak for a thousand words.

So are you ready to print sound?

Hello to all you Dutch bloggers and web site owners out there! We have just added the Dutch male and female voices this morning so that you can speech-enable all your web content to the world! Dutch is our 9th language and since we propose female and male voices for each language we now have 18 voices for our ReadSpeaker webReader service. We hope you enjoy our latest language addition!

We are now proud to release our webReader plug-in for MovableType 4. By using this plug-in you can implement the ReadSpeaker webReader service on your blog or website built with MT. You will find the plug-in on the “Implement webReader”-menu option ones you have signed up and created an account on http://webreader.readspeaker.com

We have decided to sponsor the European Accessibility Forum held on the 27th of March in Frankfurt Germany.

Web accessibility is of great importance not only for people using screen readers and other assistive technology but also for everybody else. Adopting and practicing the web standards is key to make web content accessible for more people regardless of device, browser type and operation system.

When I attended and spoke at the CSUN Conference on Disability 2009 in Los Angeles last week I had the opportunity to talk to the authors of the WCAG 2. I was glad to see that speech enabling is finally seen as enhanced accessibility, especially to make the text content more understandable. So in short; implementing a ReadSpeaker service on your website can help you to conform to some of the guidelines.

If you are attending the European Accessibility Forum in Frankfurt and would like to meet up with me, please contact info@voice-corp.com to set up a meeting.

See the Conference website for more information about the conference: http://eafra.eu/

Yesterday Drupal.org announced a new module that implements ReadSpeaker webReader for the Drupal CMS. We have not yet fully test the module ourselves, but it is available on the Drupal website.

http://drupal.org/project/webreader