Text2Go 1.5 Released

Today Tumbywood Software is pleased to announce a significant upgrade to Text2Go, the Windows text to speech program that lets you listen to text from the web on your iPod. This is a free upgrade for all existing Text2Go owners as per our Lifetime License. The major new features are:

Support for all MP3 Players, not just the iPod. Text2Go will now create MP3 files that can be used on any MP3-capable device, such as mobile phones, PDAs and of course dedicated MP3 players, such as the Zune, iRiver, Creative Zen, SanDisk, etc. Details of the article source will be embedded in the generated MP3 file, including the URL, domain, and a screenshot for use as album art.

Dictionaries to correct mispronunciations. Commonly mispronounced words, such as brand names, acronyms and industry-specific jargon can now be corrected. Text2Go ships with a Technology dictionary containing corrections for over 200 mispronunciations. Further dictionaries will be rolled out over time and users can compile their own dictionaries. Compare the text to speech results of this (highly contrived) passage of text with and without the Techonology dictionary enabled.

A recent Wikipedia entry lists a number of influential technologies including itunes, myspace, ebooks, Wimax, xbox, facebook and antispyware.

Sample without the dictionary Sample with the dictionary

Text Cleanup Rules. A text cleanup rule will automatically remove or replace specific text from a document prior to the text to speech operation. Complex pattern matching criteria are specified using regular expressions so that only the intended text is removed or replaced. Text cleanup rules are best illustrated with a couple of examples.

A recent study showed that between 60%-65% of people preferred the colour green over blue.

Without a text cleanup rule, percentage ranges will not be spoken as the author intended.

Sample without text cleanup rule Sample with text cleanup rule

Removing references from research papers is another common use of text cleanup rules. For example.

A recent survey of blog topics indicate that the most popular are ‘Blogging for profit’,15 28 72 followed by ‘Blogging about blogging’,20 38 ‘Blogging about other bloggers’,109 127 ‘Blogging how to’,69 ‘Full time blogging’, and ‘Blog review’.19 24 115

Sample without text cleanup rule Sample with text cleanup rule

Like the pronunciation dictionaries, Text2Go ships with a number of Text Cleanup Rules and users can also create their own. As the creation of a text cleanup rule requires an understanding of regular expressions, we are providing a service to create text cleanup rules for users on request.

Finally, the following minor features have also been added

Create playlists from within Text2Go.

Display the current voice and playlist in the tooltip of the Text2Go command.

‘Speak from cursor’ in the View and Edit document window.

Minor bug fixes.