You work in front of a computer eight hours a day. When you get home, you might spend a couple more staring at the harsh glare of a monitor, and if you stumble upon some particularly interesting content, you might be there all night – or at least until you get eyestrain.
Have you ever wanted to absorb all the internet has to offer while lying supine in bed? The ReadPlease Corporation of Thunder Bay, Ontario, may have the solution for you.
The company is already known for their proprietary ReadPlease software (the latest version being ReadPlease Plus 2003), a handy text-to-speech application that can read text on your screen out loud. Although the application could be extremely useful for the visual or speech impaired, everyday users can benefit too. You can listen to interesting news items, proofread important business documents, or go through especially long e-mails in any room in the house, your car, or in the office.
ReadPlease’s newest offering is the ReadingBar for Internet Explorer, which docks itself to your browser window and reads directly from web pages. There’s also a built-in reading window, which works (for the most part) the same way as ReadPlease. They also throw in a magnifying option, translation functions (through Google or BabelFish), dictionary lookup and a PDF-to-text converter.
Like ReadPlease, you can adjust the length of pauses and the speed of the voices, and add or ignore custom words and characters. The website says it even correctly identifies emoticons, although when I highlighted a smiley I heard an emotionless, gritty voice pronounce “colon left parenthesis.”
That’s the other thing about the ReadingBar: the basic package goes for $69.95 (US) and only includes Microsoft TTS voices like ice-princess Mary or kindly old robot Sam, who have been with us for years and haven’t really improved their diction. But for an extra $30 (US), you can get two 8K versions of AT&T’s Natural Voices, Mike and Crystal, mailed to you on CD-ROM.
Additional voices, such as Alain (French), Reiner (German), or Charles (“proper” British English) are $35 (US) a pop plus shipping – pricey, but AT&T’s technology is most likely the most human-sounding out there. If you speak another language or simply value your sanity, they’re a must.
You can download a free, 30-day trial version at “>www.readplease.com
