VoiceCorp help Dow Jones to reach out!

Dow Jones have really understood what speech enabling is about. It is not just something you do to help people with various disabilities. It is so much more than that. This is true “design for all” where the people with different difficulties are the biggest winner. And on top of that, they use it as a competative advantage. That’s the spirit Dow Jones!

See Dow Jones press release below. / Niclas

Dow Jones Factiva Listen Capability Transforms the Way Users Consume News

Time-Saving Tool Enables Users to Perform Other Tasks While Listening to Relevant News 

NEW YORK, (March 5, 2008) – Dow Jones & Company introduced a new “text-to-speech” capability in Dow Jones Factiva that allows users to listen to the news that drives their business. With one click, users can now listen to a news article rather than read it, freeing them to do other things and multitask as the pace of business today requires. 

Currently available in beta format, a “Listen to Article” link appears at the top of any full-text article with fewer than 4,000 words. The listen capability is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages and automatically defaults to reading in the interface language previously selected by the user.

“Dow Jones Factiva continues to set itself apart from the competition by being the first to offer text-to-speech technology in the current awareness, news and research market,” said Dennis Cahill, senior vice president and chief product officer of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. “This new capability builds on our commitment to provide customers with relevant news when, where and how they need it and to reinforce our No. 1 position in the marketplace.” 

The listen capability is a Web-based service provided by VoiceCorp (www.voice-corp.com) that converts text into speech on the fly. It is made available wherever full-text articles are found, including alerts, search results and newsletters. Once the link is clicked, the listen capability uses a Flash player to read the article.  

The addition of text-to-speech further builds on Dow Jones’s goal of integrating various forms of multimedia content into Dow Jones Factiva. In August 2007, Dow Jones Factiva added highly relevant video and audio information including business news, CEO interviews, executive speeches, shareholders meetings, product reviews and other meaningful business content. Dow Jones Factiva searches across more than 14,000 authoritative sources, including the exclusive combination of The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and Reuters newswires.

A new Blog is born!

Ok, I have finally decided to start a blog.

It will be about my passions.

That being; Entrepreneurship, software as a service (SaaS), text-to-speech (TTS), web accessibility and the world of web business.  I have been in the industry since 1999 and have founded a number of companies and technologies on my way towards the future. In 1999 I together with some friends founded Phoneticom AB, a small (only me) company that was going to explore what audio in general and speech in particular could add to the user experience on websites. After only one year we launched the first ever server based web service for Text-To-Speech. ReadSpeaker was born. After a few years of setting up companies to sell the ReadSpeaker services, sell consultancy in web accessibility, creating new innovations etc I think I have finally landed in my new company VoiceCorp. 

My philosophies about;

SaaS
It is better to let one person make a proper job installing the software on a server to let other people just use it.

Web accessibility
This is broad. It’s not about making the web working for people with disabilities, it is way to reach out to a maximum number of people, nondependent of device used, technology skills or abilities.

Entrepreneurship
Either you are or you’re not, or maybe you are but you just haven’t found out just yet.

TTS
Using text-to-speech technology is a way to free text from letters and words. It is just great for all occasions where reading is just not a good option. The quality of the speech is more about how bad you need it rather then how good it really speaks.