Frequently Asked Questions about SpeakAlong

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What makes SpeakAlong different from other digital book readers or audio books?

Most digital book or e-book readers focus on how to present text on the screen for the user to read, and pay little attention to the speech requirements of a text. SpeakAlong is expert in processing a text to be read, and in phrasing it in a realistic and sensible manner.

Audio books are ordinarily just recordings on tape, CD, or MP3. SpeakAlong does not play back a recording of a text. Rather, it reads the text word for word. It does so while cueing up the text as it is spoken. SpeakAlong also provides an interactive table of contents to help navigate large texts.

Finally, we think we offer the best value on the market. SpeakAlong costs far less than other text to speech products and goes even further than any product we know by including hours of classic books with every edition.

Are the books you offer with SpeakAlong protected by copyright law?

For now, the books we offer are obtained by us from the public domain. In other words, the texts themselves as we receive them are not copyrighted. This is how we are able to provide a large collection of works at low cost.

However, we do hold the copyright for the editions along with the editorial choices we have made, as we have published them in SpeakAlong. Therefore, our license agreement maintains that these books may not be copied or redistributed. Please refer the the license agreement for the final word on this.

Does SpeakAlong have accessible features for low-vision or blind users?

Yes. SpeakAlong is simple in appearance, but is one of the most advanced text reading applications on the market today. SpeakAlong is integrated with the assistive features of Mac OS X so that it can be easily controlled from the keyboard or with voice commands.

At ThingTone Software, we are using the Mac OS X speech recognition combined with SpeakAlong so that SpeakAlong itself can respond to spoken commands. For example, to resume play of a book you previously had open, you would simply say:

"Open SpeakAlong. Push play."

In this example, we continued listening to a book without even touching the computer.

Furthermore, SpeakAlong features a talking table of contents with every book we ship. When you select a chapter or section title, SpeakAlong will read the title of that section aloud. This aids in navigation for both young people who are not yet reading and for those who need assistance.

If you would like more information on how to do this, please contact us at: support@thingtone.net

Does SpeakAlong support the DAISY or NISO text formats?

No. SpeakAlong introduces what we think is a more generally useful digital book format called SML, or Silent Markup Language. By contrast, DAISY and NISO books are difficult to prepare and therefore expensive to collect and hard to find. With SpeakAlong's ability to navigate SML section headers and correctly find phrases and sentences within an arbitrary text, we can produce a large volume of texts and provide them bundled with SpeakAlong at little cost.

Interested in learning more about SML? See our Editor's Guide.

Do I need proof of a disability to obtain the SpeakAlong books?

No. These books are available to anyone during our trial period, and on a permanent basis for anyone who purchases a SpeakAlong license. We understand that libraries, publishers, and organizations like bookshare.org work under the Chafee Amendment to provide copyrighted materials to people with disabilities at little to no cost. ThingTone Software does not participate in that program at this time.

Why do you bundle books with the SpeakAlong software?

We want to ensure an enjoyable listening experience for our users.

Most book readers offer the promise of reading but offer no easy way to access reading material. With these you must search and shop separately while making sure to select books in the right format. Even then the quality of the spoken results will be unpredictable.

Of course, SpeakAlong will do its best to read any text file you open. But that's not good enough. This is why we have worked hard to provide you with carefully picked selections in every edition. We focus on classic literature and we aim to reach as many listeners as possible.

Each edition we ship is hand-edited to include an interactive table of contents for every title, phonetic substitutions for words that are difficult for the computer to pronounce, and edited overall for punctuation to provide a better listening experience.

If you are interested in creating your own titles or editions, you may want to look into the Standalone Edition of SpeakAlong and the Editor's Guide to Silent Markup Language.

What if I don't like any of the built-in voices on Mac OS X?

We encourage you to explore the market of third-party voices for Mac OS X. The SpeakAlong documentation makes recommendations for how you can find more realistic voices. We like the new "Alex" voice in Apple's Leopard release of OS X, and we expect the availability of quality third-party voices to improve as more people take an interest in this technology.

Will you offer SpeakAlong in languages other than English?

That depends on the demand and also greatly on the speech technology available. We have been keeping abreast of the latest development in speech over the years and have picked this time to release our first edition for English-speaking listeners. Please make your language preference known to us at support@thingtone.net.

Can I get or make MP3s from the SpeakAlong books?

The terms of our license agreement permit you to make recordings only for the personal use of the registered user.

We do not permit the distribution or broadcast in any form of recordings made from SpeakAlong except under separate terms. Please refer the the license agreement for the final word on this.

For special applications or events, licensing is available. Please contact support@thingtone.net to discuss this option.

How do I get the titles I'm looking for if I don't see them listed?

We are working to encourage other e-Book distributors to produce SpeakAlong Books and support the SML book format. This is a very new technology and we expect it will grow rapidly and result in a huge yet inexpensive collection of titles.

If you represent an organization with an interest in creating SpeakAlong compatible texts, please read more about our Standalone Edition and the Editor's Guide to Silent Markup Language.