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?