Speech-enabling for the long-tail
As you might have remembered when I wrote a post about From birth of the talking web and into the future. I owed you a follow-up note so here it is! As I had discussed, we started out by having a focused approach on which customers we should approach and which end-users would most benefit from a server-side speech-enabling solution for web sites. On the user side we have seen that the usages of our technology have increased over the past years making it appealing to a greater number of users. On the customer side, we also witnessed a greater variety of sectors interested in speech-enabling their web content ranging from public sites to banks, insurance companies, non-profit organisations and many others.
Now over the past months another change happened. We started getting an increasing amount of incoming leads from much smaller web sites and blogs also interested in speech-enabling their content. This could range from the mom and pop store with a web site to the blogger interested in space technology. These are typically 1 to 10 people organisations. Some of them are purely personal initiatives ie someone interested in a hobby while others might be freelancers, consultants, designers or any other small company or non-profit organisation. Since our company is set up to deal with mid-sized and bigger organisations we needed to see how we could propose an easy way for all these smaller web sites and blogs to speech-enable their content. The idea here was to really get a grasp on the essential features that matter to this segment and not throw in all the bells and whistles that serve no purpose at all. Then we thought how to make the implementation process as easy as possible so that all these new small customers could simply integrate our solution as a no-brainer either by using plug-ins we have developed for some popular CMS and blog platforms or either as a simple copy & paste of our HTML code directly into the source code of the page. The last point was to create a new web shop where both personal web sites and blogs as well as small companies and organisations could easily choose the most suitable package for their needs, sign-up and subscribe as seamlessly as possible.
We are now proud to announce that we are ready to launch this new venture! Our new product for this segment is called webReader and you can find out all about it by going to www.readspeaker.com. We hope you will enjoy this new service and find it useful and we will dedicate our maximum attention to support you in the best way possible. We are starting off with American and British English, Swedish and French voices and will be adding more very shortly.
Good article on text-to-speech
My colleague and co-blogger Daniel Erkstam has just published a good article about the history of text-to-speech technology. Click here to read the full article about the history of TTS.
Speech enabling for the masses!
In the past couple of months we have been getting an increasing number of requests from smaller personal or business web sites and blogs that are interested in speech-enabling their web content using the award winning ReadSpeaker text-to-speech services, but that we just simply could not dedicate enough time to present and sell our applications to. To meet their needs we have decided to open up a dedicated web shop in the next coming days and sell our new application called webReader at either affordable monthly or yearly rates or for a free ad-financed version.
Please stay tuned as we will announce the launch on the blog soon now.
If you want to be contacted as soon as webReader is available, please register at http://www.rspeak.com/wr_signup/
Google Knol – now with text-to-speech
A few days ago Google announced that they begin to experiment with text-to-speech on their “Knol”.
Quote from their site: “We are experimenting with Audio Playback as an option for some knols, starting with a handful of English language featured knols. You can listen using our Flash player, or by downloading an mp3 file and using any mp3 player.”
If a listen-button is shown next to the “print” and “share” button, you know that the Knol is available also as audio.
Read all about it and try it out here: http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/knol-audio-playback/
Listen function as Universal design
The other day I was standing in the hotel bar watching the TV. The volume was turned down completely but thanks to the real-time captioning I was able to follow the news broadcast. The day after, I was spending some hours waiting for my delayed flight at Heathrow airport to get ready for departure. There was a TV on the waiting area, again with the volume turned down. This time there was no captioning. However, they did have a sign-language narrator in the bottom right corner of the screen. That didn’t help me much since I can’t understand sign language. I was experience “Situational Disability”. In this case, text would have helped everybody that could read.Now, what about Audio? There are a great number of reasons why audio version of the text is as universal as text version of audio. Take reading a news article as an example. It is fairly difficult (not to say dangerous) to read today’s edition of the International Herald Tribune when driving a car. Text just simply doesn’t do very well in that situation. Reading it on a small mobile display is also not the best way to consume the article. If you have some kind of disability that makes it difficult to read ANY text you are in about the same situation. The fact that we want to consume written text in a situation when that is not possible (or convenient) somehow makes us all disabled. It is the situation that creates the handicap, not necessarily our abilities.
There are many people that are helped by speech function integrated on a website. I would dare to say that being able to listen to a web page is Universal Design.
The last years more and more websites subscribe to our ReadSpeaker services that speech enable the websites for anyone that rather listens than reads. We are currently working very hard to make the services more usable in any kind of situation, and regardless of what device you happen to use. It is both a question of usability and mobile user experience. ReadSpeaker is in itself completely device independent since it is a server side service, and we are now finalizing our new implementation instructions that will ensure that it works on any computer, handheld, mobile phone and whatever device that could possibly have a web browser installed. The amount of people using the mobile phone to browse the Internet is increasing dramatically and within the next 2-3 years analysts expect that almost 3 billion people will have web access through their mobile phones. It is time to get ready for this. First, to create websites that work in all these devices and also, since we would probably not see any 17 inch displays on these, speech enable the sites. For everybody that rather listens than reads.
The Official San Francisco Website, now talking to you!
VoiceCorp has done it again! The official website for the City of San Francisco is one of the latest web sites to make their content more accessible by adding the ReadSpeaker read-aloud text-to-speech service to their web pages. Most of the pages on the website now have a ”Listen” button in the tool bar right next to the ”Print”, ”Text Only” and ”Font size” functions. Listen for yourself at http://www.sfgov.org/site/mayor_index.asp
Guest blogger: Speech syntheses – one for each purpose
This is a post from todays guest blogger: Daniel Erkstam, Nordic Sales Director for VoiceCorp.
The pictures shows two robots. The left one is an industrial robot from ABB that probably is used to build cars or something similar. The right one is one of the most advanced AI robots that can be found today. It is possible to converse with it and it is very human like.
Both robots serve their purpose and do it well. And it is the same with speech syntheses.
When we launched the first speaking web services back in 2001 the only available voices was very robotic ones and became kind of boring listening to on longer texts. Today we use voices made in a complete different technique and the quality become closer and closer to recorded speech.
But the thing is that the older voices is still used by a lot of people and is even preferred compared to the newer ones for some purposes. For example people with visual impairment often prefer the older voices for screen-reading software’s like Jaws. The reason is that the older voices are more consequent on how they read the text and you can get used to the odd and robotic character of the voice. The older voices also read out the text in a more detailed way. The voices we use today are a lot more human like but also more “forgiving” when it comes to spelling errors and some words from foreign languages etc. The secret behind that is many times bigger database with the phonemes.
We know that the smaller need a person have for a synthetic speech, the harder judge he/she will be. We who doesn’t have reading difficulties or visual impairment can see/read the text and compare that to the voice speaking. Then we react on every little slight error in the pronouncing by the synthesis.
We put a lot of effort to make the reading as good as possible by making a lot of customizations so that the speech syntheses pronounce the current website’s vocabulary as good as possible. Because we know that there is a strong connection between how good it sounds and how many people that will use the service.
Back to the robots again: They might both serve their purposes well. But I guess it would be an easy choice which one you would pick to serve visitors at the reception desk, right?