Now hear this: Articles go
audio By Jesse Noyes Boston
Herald Business Reporter
Thursday, May 10, 2007
You heard it here
first.
Wanting
to give newspapers and magazines more of a voice, Harpreet Marwaha
launched AudioDizer.
The
Cambridge-based company’s technology reads articles published online
and turns them into podcasts, which can be downloaded onto iPods and
other music players, such as Microsoft’s Zune.
Transfering
the written word into audio gives readers, many of whom are already
abandoning print, the ability to catch stories even when they’re
multitasking, said Marwaha, a student at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.
AudioDizer
uses text-to-speech software that takes articles fed from newspaper
and magazine Web sites and converts them into MP3 files. The stories
can be read by male or female voices in a variety of accents.
“If
the story is based out of India, we can have the Indian voice read
it. If it’s based out of the U.K., we can have the British voice
read it,” Marwaha said.
AudioDizer
can even add short music clips to turn a news story into a
radio-style experience, he said.
Print
publications can bring in ad revenues by attaching short ads at the
beginning of the podcasts or by getting a company to sponsor it,
Marwaha said. AudioDizer, he added, will take a cut of the ad
revenues or can issue a standard fee for providing the service.
Fittingly,
the MIT Technology Review was the first magazine to jump on board
last March. In the first month about 41,000 downloads of the
magazine’s articles were tracked, said Kathleen Kennedy, senior vice
president of business development and marketing for the Technology
Review.
By
offering vocalized versions of articles, it would seem Marwaha’s
brainchild is moving readers away from the more lucrative print
product.
But
Kennedy said she doesn’t seeing the technology taking anything away
from print. “I just think it’s going to build another group of
readers.”
Maybe.
But the written word doesn’t always lend itself to speech, said
Janet Kolodzy, a journalism professor at Emerson College.
“There are some kinds of print stories that really can’t fall into a
conversational mode,” she said.
Harpreet Marwaha
is founder of Cambridge-based AudioDizer, which takes online
articles and turns them into downloadable podcasts. (Staff
photo by John Wilcox)