AudioDizer and VideoDizer Blog

Recently Folio Magazine profiled six key tools that improve user experience, engagement, and secure new revenue. The magazines that were profiled included:

• Backpacker.com - for their GearFinder service
• Inc.com. - for their Business Valuations Calculator
• MIT Technology Review - for Text to speech podcasts (powered by AudioDizer aka us!)
• Parenting.com - for their Birthday Cake Planner
• Kiplinger.com - for their Tax Withholding Calculator
• Hearst - for their Virtual Beauty Makeover

Kathleen Kennedy, Chief Strategy Officer of MIT Technology Review had some great quotes about our service (from Folio Magazine):

Why read a story when you can listen to it instead? That’s the question Technology Review, a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, answered when it began utilizing technology that converts the magazine’s text articles into audio podcasts that can be downloaded to an iPod or MP3 player.

“Technology Review has a menu at the top of every article with a button that allows the user to either listen to the article on a flash player or download it to their MP3 player,” says chief strategy officer Kathleen Kennedy. “Readers love the flexibility of being able to download articles to their MP3 players to listen to articles on-the-go.”

The text-to-audio tool launched on TechnologyReview.com in 2007 and was developed in partnership with AudioDizer, an MIT-founded start-up. It monitors the site’s RSS feed to determine when new articles are published and converts the text to audio. “AudioDizer’s voice engine breaks down a word into a set of sounds that when pieced together sounds like the real word,” Kennedy explains. “We offer a variety of customizable features including male and female voices, languages and music that is mashed up with a sponsorship message to create each file.”

The magazine says it has seen podcast downloads grow exponentially from around 18,000 to more than 350,000 per month. Kennedy says that while users access the podcasts free of charge, the magazine’s revenue source comes from selling sponsorships. Technology Review has a combination licensing/revenue sharing agreement with AudioDizer and revenues “exceed costs,” says Kennedy.

AudioDizer, Podcasting, Technology Review, revenue, text-to-speech

PhysOrg.com™, a leading web-based science, research and technology news service which covers a full range of topics, is now offering AudioDizer text to speech podcasts for every article. The podcasts are available to download on PhysOrg.com (in the article menu bar) as well as on iTunes.

To learn more about the audio program please visit the “about the audio page” on PhysOrg.com.

To advertise within these articles please contact us at bizdev@audiodizer.com

About PhysOrg:

PhysOrg.com™ is a leading web-based science, research and technology news service which covers a full range of topics. These include physics, earth science, medicine, nanotechnology, electronics, space, biology, chemistry, computer sciences, engineering, mathematics and other sciences and technologies. Launched in 2004, PhysOrg’s readership has grown steadily to include 1.75 million scientists, researchers, and engineers every month. PhysOrg publishes approximately 100 quality articles every day, offering some of the most comprehensive coverage of sci-tech developments world-wide. Quancast 2009 includes PhysOrg in its list of the Global Top 2,000 Websites. PhysOrg community members enjoy access to many personalized features such as social networking, a personal home page set-up, RSS/XML feeds, article comments and ranking, the ability to save favorite articles, a daily newsletter, and other options.

AudioDizer, Podcasting, advertising, text-to-speech PhysOrg.com

AudioDizer and Current TV have teamed up to launch a cutting edge new service that utilizes Current TV’s user created content and AudioDizer text-to-speech. The Current News or “newspod” is a three-minute mash-up of user submitted content on the Web that will play every hour on both Current.com as well as on Current TV.

Here is one of the newspods:

The segment will also be played on top of hour, every hour on TV. Below are some of their channel listings:

DirecTV - channel 366
Dish Network - channel 196
Comcast - channel 107
AT&T U-Verse - channel 189

To check additional listings for Time Warner, etc check the Current website.

About Current:

Current is the world’s first and only peer-to-peer news and information network dedicated to young adults. The Emmy® award winning Current empowers viewers (core age 18-34) to create, influence and determine the content they want to see. The connection between the content and the audience is more powerful than on any other news and information media platform. This is the destination where content and audience fuse together to create the next wave in media. It’s inspirational and aspirational. For real. Just look at the facts.

About AudioDizer:

AudioDizer is a digital media company focused on getting traditional text context to audio. AudioDizer works with newspaper, magazine, and blog content companies to help create an audio podcast for every single article published. Through its patented voice engineering process, AudioDizer uses text to speech technology to create a radio like podcast. The podcasts include multiple voices (male and female), music, and have the ability to embed advertising sponsorships in each MP3. All podcasts can be found on iTunes or on AudioDizer.com

To find out more about contact bizdev@audiodizer.com

AudioDizer, Current, Current TV, text-to-speech, video

AudioDizer is now producing podcasts for iTnews.com.au a Haymarket Media Company based in Australia. Currently, the service is live for the Telecommunications section and the remaining sections of the website will be next.

iTnews.com.au is using AudioDizer’s premium voices. The podcasts will be available for download, streaming, as well as can be subscribed to via iTunes or through any other podcast aggregator. All podcasts can be found on iTnews website.

To listen to a sample click here.

For more information on these podcasts or for advertising contact bizdev@audiodizer.com.

AudioDizer, Podcasting, advertising, iTnews.com.au, text-to-speech

Part of Microsoft’s ad campaign with MIT’s Technology Review includes an advertising message on AudioDizer’s podcast files. Microsoft is advertising their new VoIP service and is sponsoring the InfoTech channel on Technology Review. Also, what is unique about the advertising message is that it was created using text-to-speech technology - so it was very easy to produce and cost effective.

Learn more about the advertising by contacting bizdev@audiodizer.com. To listen to the advertising message go to Technology Review’s website and listen to any story in InfoTech.

AudioDizer, MIT, Microsoft, Technology Review, advertising, text-to-speech

Here is the official press release from MIT Technology Review for the launch of the AudioDizer service:

From Yahoo Businesswire

Technology Review First to Introduce T2S Podcasts
Wednesday April 18, 5:53 pm ET

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Technology Review, the authority on the future of technology, is the first media property to combine podcasting and text-to-speech (T2S) technology to give its tech-savvy users yet another way to get their daily news. The move suddenly makes podcasting more than just an afterthought for a news organization.

Technology Review has partnered with AudioDizer to generate podcasts for all our online articles. AudioDizer is an MIT-founded company that employs cutting-edge text-to-speech (T2S) technology to generate audio files. Audio is streamed directly from the site or downloaded to an iPod or MP3 player.

Implementation of T2S is one of the many innovations from the forward-thinking media company. Beyond T2S streamed audio, TechnologyReview.com offers a number of unique features, including daily technology news, award-winning video, authoritative blogs, multiple RSS feeds, and interactive features. In addition to an already impressive list of multimedia, mobile content is rolling out next quarter.

“We believe our users to be genuinely platform agnostic,” says Jason Pontin, publisher and editor in chief. “They demand quality content in multiple formats, and that’s what our site delivers. We’re giving readers a better way to enjoy what we’ve traditionally delivered in the magazine, with unique new technologies they will actually use.”

TechnologyReview.com visitors are deeply engaged with the daily news site, as evidenced by an increase of 40% in page impressions over the past 12 months. Marketers also recognize the value of TechnologyReview.com, with ad revenue having increased 46% during the past 12 months. New site advertisers include Sony and Intel.

About TechnologyReview.com

Published by MIT and online since 1995, TechnologyReview.com delivers daily news about emerging technologies and their impact to senior executives, technology innovators, and opinion leaders. The site includes daily original content, news aggregation, authoritative blogs, unique videos, and podcasts. Unique visitors have increased by 98 percent since TechnologyReview.com’s relaunch as a daily website in November 2005.

About Technology Review, Inc.

Technology Review, Inc., an independent media company owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the authority on the future of technology, identifying emerging technologies and analyzing their impact for leaders. Technology Review’s media properties include Technology Review magazine, the oldest technology magazine in the world (founded in 1899); the daily news website TechnologyReview.com; and events such as the annual Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT.

Contact:
Technology Review, Inc.
Kathleen Kennedy, 617-475-8000
Kathleen.kennedy@technologyreview.com
http://www.technologyreview.com

——————————————————————————–
Source: Technology Review, Inc.

AudioDizer, MIT, Podcasting, Technology Review, magazine, text-to-speech

MIT Technology Review and AudioDizer have teamed up to bring text-to-speech podcasts for all of Technology Review’s articles, blogs, special reports and magazines.

Now you can get the latest technology news in MP3 format. Whether you listen to it on your computer or take it to go on your iPod/cell phone – best of all it’s all free!

To listen to an article, please go to TechnologyReview.com and click on any article. Un the “Audio” tab in the article’s toolbar select “Listen Now” or “Download”.

To subscribe to these podcasts so that they can be automatically downloaded to your computer or iPod, please click on the subscribe icon here.

Click to view Press Release.

AudioDizer, MIT, Podcasting, Technology Review, magazine, technology, text-to-speech

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

In this blog we will be writing about digital media trends, sharing thoughts on text-to-speech, posting media events, and press releases about AudioDizer and Podcasting. Please feel free to contribute to our discussion.

Thanks,
The AudioDizer Team

AudioDizer, Blogroll, Podcasting, text-to-speech