You may have noticed a new feature that’s appearing throughout the O’Reilly web sites, the ability to “listen” to our articles and blogs. You can hear some examples on this blog or at:

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/

Click the “Listen” button to the right of the title and a synthetic voice reader will read the article to you.

I’ve been watching this technology for a number of years now, and I’m really excited to finally launch something that works to the degree this does. I’m excited for a number of reasons.

First, because people are so busy and have so many content choices to choose from, this will give us an added advantage. People who normally read our content, a singular task, can now listen to it while doing other things, as they would a radio program. We’ll shortly be implementing a podcast-on-the-fly feature so that readers can choose to listen to our content at their leisure on their iPods and other devices.

Second, this will make our content more accessible. The technology behind this was first created to aid the handicapped.

Third, the technology behind this reads XML, html, and xhtml, and can be easily trained. We can train the voice to read Java or Perl code accurately, or tables. This has been a roadblock with other voice technology I’ve looked at.

Is it perfect yet? No. As you click around and listen you’ll notice imperfections. The reader stumbles over malformed html and certain words and phrases, and it still needs help when reading code. But as I said, the voice is easily trained, and we’re adding a feedback mechanism so readers can help us perfect the service. That will be included in a day or two. It will obviously be better for straight narratives, and less useful for code heavy content, but even that can be dealt with. And a note to editors and copyeditors, the reader makes typos very obvious.

The company behind this is ReadSpeaker, a small company based in Sweden. ReadSpeaker was started in 1999 with the goal of making the Internet accessible to the handicapped. Since succeeding in that realm they’ve expanded to others. I first came across them on the International Herald Tribune website. Their clients are primarily based in Europe and we’re they first US customer.

I’d like to give a big thanks to Jonathan Wellons, Laura Adair, and Julie Delany for implementing this on the O’Reilly Network, oreilly.com, and conferences blog. Gabriel Williams will shortly be rolling out the same service on the Radar.

–Allen

P.S.–We have the choice of both male and female voices, and the correct one will soon apply to the gender of the author.