Converting PDFs to Audio Formats Means Easy Listening

Don Fluckinger wrote an article on the new OmniPage 15 optical-character recognition software, released this week. This new software from ScanSoft lets you convert your PDFs to WAV or AIFF files and listen to them on-the-go.

ScanSoft, which has been acquiring companies left and right for years as the speech technologies market consolidates, has enabled such rip-mix-burn capability in its OmniPage 15 optical-character recognition software, released recently.
 
By integrating RealSpeak text-to-speech technology-which ScanSoft acquired in its 2003 merger with SpeechWorks-into OmniPage, it’s possible to make PDFs (or pretty much any document in any format) talk to you through your iPod or similar device. And that’s not just electronic files: OmniPage can make paper (provided you have a scanner) or image PDFs-bitmap files of scanned text-into WAV files as well.
 
“The idea is to take any piece of paper, any PDF, any image file, and covert it to a WAV file that can be put into your iTunes, burned onto a CD, or put into any of a number of audio devices-so that you have a portable audio file of your text document,” said Chris Strammiello, ScanSoft director of product marketing.
 
“They were talking about not having the ability to read information all the time, and wouldn’t it be great if they could listen to it?” Strammiello said. “The genesis of the idea [was making information] more accessible to them. When we rolled that concept out to a horizontal section of our user base beyond the doctors, we got a real positive response, and that’s what led to rolling RealSpeak [into OmniPage].”
 
It made sense to OmniPage’s developers that not only doctors would use audio document files, but other user groups as well-such as people who proofread documents by listening to them being read aloud, and visually impaired people who rely on screen-reader software to read text to them.
 
Read the full article on PDFzone.com