[real-eyes] Fw: Speech Being Used to Pimp News
- From: <bigdaddylou63@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bigdaddylou63@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2008 02:23:20 -0500
> Speech Technology Magazine
> Wednesday, December 12, 2007
>
> Speech Being Used to Pimp News
>
> By Ryan Joe
>
> Tech startup PimpMyNews.com announced its wide launch today. Dubbed the
> world's first "talking social news site," PimpMyNews speechifies newsfeeds
> and blog entries from around the Internet using text-to-speech technology
> from a variety of vendors, including NeoSpeech.
>
> After signing up, users customize their topics from 57 categories,
> including entertainment, politics, and business. Users with iPods or other
> MP3 players can elect to receive fresh content regardless of
> location-allowing them to stay up-to-date even without a computer. For
> PimpMyNews co-founder John Atkinson, audio gives users the freedom to
> consume media whenever and wherever they want.
>
> "To me, voice adds a portable, easier consumption method than reading," he
> says. "The Internet has grown in popularity." He cites a Pew Research
> Center study which states that one-in-three Americans get their news
> online today, versus one-in-fifty a decade ago. "The problem with using
> the Internet to read news is that in most cases," he continues, "you're
> searching for news on multiple sites and have to sit and be at your
> computer. The nice thing about PimpMyNews is we convert that news to a
> portable audio format. It's sort of like TiVo for news and blogs."
>
> It's still too early to tell how PimpMyNews will be received by the
> general populace. While it certainly provides constant connectivity-it
> updates frequently from a variety of sites, including newsfeeds like
> Reuters and blogs like Gizmodo-it's unclear how users will respond to the
> synthesized voice. For this writer, the voice was clear and distinct when
> it read hard news stories, but didn't fare as well reading content from
> blogs like PerezHilton.com, where the voice was unable to capture the
> ironic underpinnings of the site.
>
> "Text to speech has for a long time been monotone," says Atkinson. "It's
> very difficult to automate that on a regular basis. And everything you see
> on PimpMyNews is fully automated, happens on the fly in real time. We're
> pretty pleased with our ability to get content and convert it in real
> time, but user's ears are very finely tuned."
>
> Still, the site is in its early days and, besides the synthesized voice,
> Atkinson and his crew continue to refine the site. For instance, to avoid
> mispronunciations-inevitable in a world where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a
> prime newsmaker-PimpMyNews maintains a customized dictionary that's
> constantly updated using either visual or phonetic representations.
> Additionally, users can write in to identify mispronunciations.
>
> So far, Atkinson describes the site as a "labor of love" though the plan
> is to get revenue through advertising and premium services that users have
> to pay for-such as an intelligent search that monitors a user's specific
> area of interest.
>
> Voice has yet to find its widespread function on the Internet, which
> thrives on mostly graphical interfaces. Recently however, sites like
> Facebook and Myspace have initiated applications that give voice a greater
> role. PimpMyNews also gives users the ability to consume media in a unique
> way. And while analysts predict that voice will soon be integrated more
> fluidly into the Web, they're unsure how and in what form that integration
> will take place.
>
>
> http://www.speechtechmag.com/Articles/News~News-Feature~Speech-Being-Used-to-Pimp-News-40421.aspx
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