On Electronic Texts and Talking Book Readers
05 Feb 2007 |
Books and Book
Readers
The landscape of the digital book world is
experiencing rapid change as electronic texts and
audio books collide, pushing up a growing new field
in computer software known as the talking
storyteller, or talking book. These programs, once
part of a specialty field for the vision impaired
user, combined with the availability of thousands of
texts in digital form, offer a new and enjoyable
reading experience. Read on to find out more about
this new technology.
Over the last decade, you must have noticed,
bookstores have not only grown in size, they have
devoted more and more floor space to audio books
(books on tape and CD). Meanwhile, a growing market
of handheld devices (or PDAs) and book reader (etext
reader, doc reader) software have generated demand
for books in electronic form for people to read
on-screen. Add to the mix the advent of online audio
book services like audible.com and there's no limit
to the digital books you can have--except cost, and
these can really add up.
Now a new kind of software is emerging which combines the audio book and the book reader. For lack of a better name, let's call it talking storyteller, or talking book software. Using the latest text-to-speech technology, this software works with books in electronic form and "reads" them through a lifelike human voice on the computer.
That's not new, you might say. Perhaps you (or your parents) can remember back to the earliest days of the Mac when Steve Jobs famously demonstrated the world's first talking personal computer. People were momentarily amazed, then shrugged. What is this good for? we all wondered. But that was then. In the more than twenty years since, the voices for computer speech have become very good, just like with computer animation.
During that time, researchers and engineers at Apple and elsewhere worked out assistive technology to help the vision impaired and people with other disabilities take advantage of computers with speech recognition and synthesis. On another front, specialized hardware devices like Braille readers and portable readers for the DAISY book format made up another kind of worthwhile (and expensive) speech technology.
Despite these advances computers still aren't doing a whole lot of talking, except--much to our chagrin--on the phone when we call for customer service and support. There are two reasons for this. First, the programs for reading text have not been able to overcome all of the "junk" in the text (like punctuation, outlines, numbering, etc.) making listening a tedious experience. Second, the texts have been hard to come by.
Enter the entrepreneur. A few software developers, notably at ThingTone Software, are filling in the gaps through a combination of efforts. To solve the problem of cleaning up texts for speech synthesis, texts are hand-edited with a simple mark-up language for the purpose of easy navigation by the software. The SpeakAlong program, for example, can present very large texts (like the King James Bible) in a simple, intuitive manner by offering an interactive (and spoken) table of contents for compatible books.
Combined with an algorithm for breaking an arbitrary text into sensible phrasing for the computer voice, the talking book program can yield a spoken performance that is both remarkably lifelike, and pleasing to the ear. As to the availability of books, various efforts (especially see gutenberg.org) on the Internet are, collectively, offering up thousands of ebook titles. Many of these are in the public domain (no copyright).
So it seems the time is ripe to bring many of the world's classics in literature into your home. You could soon possess a very large personal library of books without putting up a single bookshelf. And best of all, your computer will read them for you--to you, that is.
Now a new kind of software is emerging which combines the audio book and the book reader. For lack of a better name, let's call it talking storyteller, or talking book software. Using the latest text-to-speech technology, this software works with books in electronic form and "reads" them through a lifelike human voice on the computer.
That's not new, you might say. Perhaps you (or your parents) can remember back to the earliest days of the Mac when Steve Jobs famously demonstrated the world's first talking personal computer. People were momentarily amazed, then shrugged. What is this good for? we all wondered. But that was then. In the more than twenty years since, the voices for computer speech have become very good, just like with computer animation.
During that time, researchers and engineers at Apple and elsewhere worked out assistive technology to help the vision impaired and people with other disabilities take advantage of computers with speech recognition and synthesis. On another front, specialized hardware devices like Braille readers and portable readers for the DAISY book format made up another kind of worthwhile (and expensive) speech technology.
Despite these advances computers still aren't doing a whole lot of talking, except--much to our chagrin--on the phone when we call for customer service and support. There are two reasons for this. First, the programs for reading text have not been able to overcome all of the "junk" in the text (like punctuation, outlines, numbering, etc.) making listening a tedious experience. Second, the texts have been hard to come by.
Enter the entrepreneur. A few software developers, notably at ThingTone Software, are filling in the gaps through a combination of efforts. To solve the problem of cleaning up texts for speech synthesis, texts are hand-edited with a simple mark-up language for the purpose of easy navigation by the software. The SpeakAlong program, for example, can present very large texts (like the King James Bible) in a simple, intuitive manner by offering an interactive (and spoken) table of contents for compatible books.
Combined with an algorithm for breaking an arbitrary text into sensible phrasing for the computer voice, the talking book program can yield a spoken performance that is both remarkably lifelike, and pleasing to the ear. As to the availability of books, various efforts (especially see gutenberg.org) on the Internet are, collectively, offering up thousands of ebook titles. Many of these are in the public domain (no copyright).
So it seems the time is ripe to bring many of the world's classics in literature into your home. You could soon possess a very large personal library of books without putting up a single bookshelf. And best of all, your computer will read them for you--to you, that is.