If you read on our About Us page, we mention when we were considering purchasing iPods and what they were capable of doing at the time, which was very limited in its early stages. In comes AudioDizer…we create this software to produce audio files capable of being played on an mp3 player, and realize that we could potentially turn any website with text into audio. At that time in technology, the iPod wouldn’t sync with Windows (you had to have a special utility to get it to work with Windows), RSS was just starting to be published on websites and the internet was not how we know it as today. So, the question on our mind was, how do we bring our software and service into the market?
A lot of service and software creators have the same question as they produce something new. How do you get people to notice what you’re doing and willing to use it? Also, is being first to market the best? Take a look at Netscape. They were the first browser that was adopted by a large number of users. Then along came Internet Explorer; IE basically took over the users that Netscape had built up. But, were there other factors involved? Was the time better in the market when Internet Explorer launched? Did Microsoft have a more loyal user base who all abandoned Netscape? Was IE a better product? I’m sure there are a lot of analysts with different opinions on why Netscape died and IE became the most used browser.
Bottom line is, there is no definitive answer on why things take off and why some things die. You can speculate about it all day and night, and may never come up with the right answer. So, here are some tips that I think are good to follow when writing a new product (this also goes for hobby programs that you release):
1. Believe in your product. If you don’t believe in it and use it, how can you expect other people to.
2. Beta test. Have people sign up to Beta test your product in its early stages to see what they think and how to make it better based on real feedback. Listen to your users!!!!
3. Watch the market and new technologies. Maybe a new piece of hardware will come out the next day that your product can leverage to make it a lot more powerful.
4. Know your audience. Who will use your technology? Figure this one out early on.
AudioDizer
Right now it seems like the two big IT companies (Google and Microsoft) are racing towards the voice search market using speech recognition. There was an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal today talking about what each are attempting to accomplish in this area. They both really see the necessity to have an automated 411 service. Microsoft’s spin is that there is a mobile application attached to it which will give you a display on your mobile phone. Am I just missing something here, or is the vision very limited? There is a quote from the Yahoo VP who seems to realize the importance of voice technology in mobile space:
“We do believe that voice technology in the mobile space will play a very important role,” said Marco Boerries, who holds the title at Yahoo of senior vice president for connected life.
As mobile phones and other portable devices become adopted more and more by users, their functionality is starting to bridge and combine with other products. The iPhone is an example of this (phone + iPod), and I think that eventually cell phones will be like a mini-computer. Who wants to carry around a specific device for everything? Not me! Who knows…soon I might be able to write code and compile it on my phone (maybe a Visual Studio Mobile Edition?) or remote desktop into my server to fix a bug. Right now the mobile space seems limitless! There’s obviously a dependency to the mobile hardware available which limits the kind of software being created, but the hardware is getting better every day. This is all very exciting to me, thinking about the possibilities that AudioDizer has to lend a hand in this movement. At the moment I sync my mobile phone to my podcasts and listen to them, and I think it’s great.
The only thing in question here is how will people like the service. Will it recognize what they say right away, or will they have to repeat themselves until they just give up? Also, the tolerance for speech automation is still in question. We at AudioDizer have tried to make the experience as close as listening to a real news cast so that it is similar to what people hear everyday from the TV, radio or other podcasts. People want to think they are listening to a real person. Who would want to listen to something in the voice of Dr. Sbaitso? Not me! It will be interesting to see what kind of voices Google and Microsoft use to communicate back to the user and if it is tolerable.
AudioDizer
I’ve seen many requests for foreign languages lately on our community site as well as emails asking us about support for mulitple languages. I wanted to let everyone know that although currently we are only publishing mp3 files in english, we do support multiple languages. We have not enabled this on our website but hopefully we will soon. What you will eventually see, is in the member section when you add an RSS feed we will give you the option to select the language that the feed is in. We understand that people in many different countries would like to have AudioDizer produce their content! If you are interested in working with us and getting your content in another language besides english, please contact us at bizdev@audiodizer.com.
Thanks for trying out the service!
AudioDizer
A huge acquisition has been finalized today in Microsoft buying Tellme. If you go to Tellme’s homepage they have a description that I thought was interesting:
Tellme brings you answers. The latest sports scores, the local Chinese restaurant, updated stock quotes, weather reports, driving directions and more.
Seems to me what they are trying to accomplish is to be able to call up their service, speak a question into it and get back information. A scenario seems like a user would call up and say “Seattle weather” and then the service would speak back the answer. Apparently there is a huge bet from Tellme and Microsoft that this will be a worthwhile service. It seems like this is kind of one step further than MovieFone and just voice enabled instead. I’m not saying that it will not be a great service, but it just seems kind of…limited.
I went to the beta products home page and it looks like what they are offering is similar to what Google has already in their SMS service. Except with voice.
What would be a great product would be where I can have an application that I could load up on my phone, talk into it and say “latest U.S. News” and get an option of stories which I can then listen to. My user scenario would go something like this: Someone mentions to me at work that there has been a hurricane which hit the east coast. I’m too busy at work to seek out the details but I do spend a lot of time commuting home from work, so during my commute I load up this application. I speak into it “Hurricanes on the east coast” and it responds “New York Times”, “USA Today”, “CNN”, and so on. From there I would say “New York Times” and then from there it would speak to me the article (using AudioDizer of course). Now that would be useful!
AudioDizer, text-to-speech
If you are not familiar with what Products and Services AudioDizer provides, head over to the Products page. Right now on the internet there are tons of Web 2.0 sites that provide users the ability to add thier own content and edit it such as flickr, youtube, and many others. What is not yet available on the internet is a way for companies to present their web content through all the new digital products with rich content. That’s where AudioDizer comes in. We are constantly coming up with new ways for websites to present their media and engage users. Our newest product will be available at: VideoDizer soon. Thanks for stopping by!
AudioDizer