Back in June, Apple introduced a new iBook feature it calls Read Aloud, which is similar to Nook's Read to Me feature in that it provides a human voice narration that syncs to the onscreen text. In both commercial cases, the feature is meant primarily for children's books. Now Apple has updated its iBookstore Assets Guide to include instructions on how to add a Read Aloud narration track to your EPUB file. You can't access the latest guide unless you're a registered iTunes Connect member, but eBookNewswer has printed part of the relevant section: "You can create a Read Aloud book...

I didn’t notice this David Pogue article from August 12th until Techdirt and Slashdot pointed it out just the other day. Though most of the article is about other cool features offered by iOS 4 (unified contacts, Facetime tricks), in the last section Pogue talks about the VoiceOver “spoken books” feature on the iPad and wonders why the Authors Guild and publishers hasn’t freaked out about it. I previously looked at the matter back in March; you’d think they would have had time to speak up by now. Yes, this is exactly the feature that...

Remember the Intel Reader, the $1500 handheld device that acts as a hand-held portable scanner/OCR/text-to-speech device for the blind? A company called LookTel is in the beta stage of bringing something similar to Windows Mobile camera phones. The device will speak aloud text (package labels or street signs) or identify currency within its field of vision; snapshot-OCR magazine articles, book pages, and so forth; and allow adding voice tags to patterned labels that can be applied to containers and other objects without speakable text. According to the article, it will even allow the user to provide...

Apple has posted a webpage with details about the iBooks iPad app. There are a couple of points of particular interest to TeleReaders. First of all, iBooks will allow you to “add free ePub titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on your iPad.” That’s right, the page specifically uses the word “free”. Presumably it means “DRM-free”—since iBooks won’t use or support ADEPT, if someone gave an ADEPT DRM-encumbered e-book away for free, it still would not work. Still, this is good news for Baen readers, since even Baen’s commercially-sold e-books have no DRM,...

For the past several years, film critic Roger Ebert has been unable to talk, due to complications from cancer surgery that left him without a lower jaw. But thanks to CereProc, a company that mines words and syllables from existing audio sources (such as the many commentary tracks and TV shows Ebert has recorded) and sets them up in a text-to-speech application, Ebert is now able to “speak” with a voice that is noticeably his. It will never be mistaken for his “real” voice from days of old, but it sounds a lot better than the stock...

From eBooks Just Published: I’ve just released two incredible new text to speech voices for use with Text2Go. They are called Amy and Brian and have been developed by IVONA Software. I really think they’re amazing - certainly the best I’ve ever heard. You can read the press release on the Text2Go blog or better still listen to the press release as narrated by Amy or Brian. As a matter of fact, I did listen to the press releases at the links above, and the voices are so good that I decided to post this article....

There is one last aspect of the Astak that I need to review before shipping it back in. That is one of the major ways it differs from the Sony, and one of the ways it is similar to the Kindle 2: text-to-speech read-aloud mode. Note that with the version of firmware with which the Astak shipped, only PDFs could be read aloud. However, a more recent firmware upgrade expanded speech-compatibility and now it works with ePub too. (And perhaps other formats; I did not check.) I connected the Astak to my computer and recorded a couple of minutes of the...

I received the following email from Mark Gladding, founder of Tumbywood Software in Australia. I reprint it because it is important that our readers with disabilities have as much information available to them as possible. The Text2Go software he describes costs US$ 45, which includes one voice. I noticed your recent article describing converting ebooks to MP3 files so you can listen to them on your Kindle. I don’t know if you’re aware but I have a similar text to speech product called Text2Go, that will convert any DRM-free ePub ebook into an iTunes Audiobook for playback on your iPod/iPhone...

Venturebeat has an article looking at the $1,500 Intel Reader portable text-to-speech device Intel has just released. It is the size of a paperback book and can read from files or capture printed text with its built-in digital camera. The Intel Reader is meant specifically for the blind or visually-impaired. “We want people to experience the independence of being able to read on their own in a public place or anywhere they want to,” said [Intel representative Ben Foss], speaking at a press event on Monday. “A metaphor for this are the ramps...

How good is the Kindle 2’s text to speech feature? No, the TTS isn’t the equal of a human voice, especially one as memorable as that of Jim Dale, the Harry Potter narrator shown with actress Glenn Close. Many have complained of the lack of inflection. Some have cited this as one reason for Amazon and others not to disable TTS to satisfy the whims of publishers. I myself think that playing text is fair use, just as large purple characters or a certain typeface would be. In all honesty, however, the K2’s speech synthesis...

According to Publishers Weekly Hachette has issued a statement on its position on text to speech for the Kindle as well as other hardware platforms. Hachette pretty much follows the Amazon position, saying that unless its authors object, it has no issue with adding TTS for the vast majority of its books. The only exceptions, HBG said, would be for “books that fall within our audio publishing program or specialized circumstances like memoirs, where the author or character’s voice is an artistic element of the work. Under such circumstances HBG reserves the right to request that the functionality be disabled.” The statement...

Now this looks very, very interesting and will certainly be a huge blessing to a large community of challenged readers. Here is the beginning of a long article on the site. There are far more technical issues than I would have imagined. Speech or not, anyone who is interested in creating EPUB books will want to read the article: Recently I’ve been working on an ePub reader prototype. Once I’ve created a robust ePub ebook reader, I’m going to move this functionality into my text to speech application, Text2Go. My goal is provide a system that will convert...