July 2005

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[1 - Greetings - Win a Golf Shirt from NextUp!]
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Hello from NextUp.com!

Congratulations to Judy S., who won our previous drawing for a Rave-MP 256 MB Sport MP3 Player.  This month one lucky winner will receive our latest NextUp.com golf shirt, so be sure to read on for details on how you can enter the drawing.  Thanks for staying tuned!

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[2 - Content Site of the Month]
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Each month we like to feature a web site on the net that contains great text you can easily move into TextAloud for listening.  This month we wanted to find a good news site.  We know many of our customers use TextAloud to create audio files from current news stories to listen on the go with portable audio players.   A great site for this is

http://news.myway.com/index.html

Similar to Yahoo, Google and other sites that include news feeds, MyWay has the advantage of no banner ads or popups, and also typically much cleaner pages where the news text is easy to copy cleanly.

Also remember, if you haven't already, check out our NewsAloud product at

http://nextup.com/NewsAloud/index.html

NewsAloud can automatically retrieve news stories from about a dozen categories and create audio files or let you listen live on your PC.  You can download a trial version of NewsAloud at

http://nextup.com/NewsAloud/download.html

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[3 - TextAloud 2.0 Tip of the Month - Batch File Converter]
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TextAloud 2.0 includes a convenient method for converting a large number of text files to audio files quickly.  From the TextAloud main menu, select File->Batch File Converter.  From this window you can select any number of existing text, Word, or PDF files as well as details for the output audio files such as file format, voice, etc.  This feature can save a great deal of time if you frequently convert several files.

Details on this and other TextAloud features can be found in the TextAloud 2.0 manual at

http://www.nextup.com/manual.html

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[4 - About NextUp.com Voices]
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Over the past several years of working with you, we've heard again and again that you like having a wide variety of voices.  Whether just simply to provide variety, to simulate multiple characters, or for use with foreign languages, many users use several different voices.  So, we've made it a priority to offer an ever-growing variety of TTS Voices.  As this stable of voices continues to grow, we wanted to take this chance to summarize what is currently available, and let you know we will be adding more.

Older Free Voices
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In the bottom section of

http://nextup.com/TextAloud/SpeechEngine/voices.html

we have several older free voices that are available for download.  These include Mary, Mike, and Sam from Microsoft, as well as a dozen or so old Lernout & Hauspie voices available in US English, UK English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

These voices are built on technologies that are about a decade old, and they sound very much like computers or robots speaking.

Now let's look at newer generation voices.  These are all built based on actual human sounds and provide much better quality.

AT&T Natural Voices
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AT&T Natural Voices provide very high-quality, human sounding speech.  Each voice takes up between 300 and 600 megabytes of disk space, and is available by download or shipped on CD.  The voices are very human sounding, not robotic.  There are 18 voices available in all, in languages including US English, UK English, Indian Accent English, Spanish, German, French, and Canadian French.  They can be purchased in the highest quality 16khz version, or a slightly cheaper and smaller footprint 8khz version.  Samples, more information and purchase of these is at

http://www.nextup.com/attnv.html

NeoSpeech Voices
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NextUp.com also offers voices from NeoSpeech.  Kate and Paul are very natural sounding US English voices.  While all voices support speed adjustments, NeoSpeech voices also support pitch adjustments, meaning you can adjust to your taste and for additional variety.  Most users we talk with believe that these voices sound more natural than any other voice on the market, but may make a few more pronunciation errors, which can be corrected with our built-in pronunciation editor.  Samples and purchase info for Neospeech Kate and Paul can be found at

http://www.nextup.com/neospeech.html

Cepstral Voices
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Finally, we also have a large set of voices from Cepstral.  These voices are quite unique and differ greatly from the NeoSpeech and AT&T voices.  While they aren't nearly as natural sounding, they have other advantages.  They require much less disk space, between 30 and 50 megabytes.  They are very accurate, require less computer processor time, and are very fast at making audio files.  Cepstral Voices also support speed and pitch adjustments.  18 voices are available in all, in languages including US English, English Female Child, Scottish Accent, UK English, Canadian French, German, and Spanish.  Samples and more info at

http://www.nextup.com/Cepstral.html

Also, Cepstral just announced they have voices available for Mac users at

http://www.nextup.com/redir/cepstral.html

If you have any questions regarding any of our voices, just let us know at support@nextup.com.  Also, stay tuned for upcoming announcements of high-quality voices in additional languages including Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.

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[5 - Spreading the word about NextUp Talker]
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We recently announced the release of NextUp Talker 1.0, an Assistive Technology product specifically designed for people who have temporarily or permanently lost their voices.  Now, we need your help.  If you know of anyone that could use this technology, or know of organizations or web sites that specialize in helping those with physical impairments that prevent them from speaking, please let us know and help tell others about NextUp Talker.

With the range of natural, human-sounding voices available from NextUp.com, as well as a host of quick and convenient shortcuts for conversational, commonly-used sentences and phrases, NextUp Talker allows users to easily communicate with others despite vocal impairments, using Windows-based Desktop, Laptop or Tablet PCs.

You can download a free 30 Day Trial version of NextUp Talker now from

http://www.talkforme.com/downloads.html

NextUp Talker is available for purchase for $99.95 at

http://www.talkforme.com/purchase.html

Thanks for helping us spread the word about this important new product.

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[6 - Enter to Win a NextUp.com Golf Shirt]
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All you have to do to enter a drawing to win our latest NextUp.com golf shirt is tell us three different uses you can think of for our TextAloud software.  Send your email to

newsletterdrawing@nextup.com

We'll draw a winner from entries received by Friday, July 15 to win one of our new NextUp.com Golf Shirts.  Thanks and best of luck!

If you find our products useful, please share the news with your friends and at your place of business.  We offer Volume Pricing with Site Licensing available to schools, organizations and businesses.  If you'd like more information on this or have questions about any of our products, please don't hesitate to contact us at

support@nextup.com

Thank you for your interest in our company & products. 

The NextUp.com Team
NextUp.com
The Power of Spoken Audio
http://www.NextUp.com

A Division of NextUp Technologies, LLC



 

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