September 2005

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

Congratulations to John S. in Japan, our previous drawing winner.  This month one lucky winner will receive one of our new NextUp.com golf shirts, so be sure to read on for details on how you can enter the drawing.  Thanks for staying tuned!

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[2 - New Premium Italian Voice Available]
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We are happy to announce we have a new premium Italian voice available from Cepstral and NextUp.com.  Her name is Vittoria.  You can hear samples and try out an interactive demo of our first Italian voice at

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

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[3 - TextAloud Tip of the Month - Using Skins to Change TextAloud's Appearance]
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>From time to time we get suggestions to improve the appearance of the TextAloud window.  While TextAloud may have a ton of features and work great, some users seem to think it is ugly.  Perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if you think TextAloud is ugly, TextAloud 2 includes skins.  Skins are a way to drastically change the look of a program.  You can find these under View->Skins on the TextAloud main menu.  You can choose from over 60 unique looks for the program to change window shape and color scheme. 

One thing to note.  If you are sight-impaired and use a screen reader, don't use skins as the screen readers do not like them.  Otherwise, have fun playing with different looks of TextAloud.

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[4 - Beta test of Unicode Support and Exciting New Asian Voices]
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We are currently running a beta test of a newer version of TextAloud.  For those who aren't familiar, beta tests are when we invite advanced users to try out new functionality.  We only ask that they be generally proficient with TextAloud and computers in general, and pass along any problems they find.  The new features we are testing involve support for Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.

Additionally, we are offering reduced price purchase of new Neospeech voices we will be releasing for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.  So if you are fluent or want to learn these languages, check out our latest beta test at

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

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[5 - Content Site of the Month]
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We are always looking for great content ideas from our users.  These sites are full of great texts you can easily turn into great listening.  Our site this month is Classic Reader at

http://www.classicreader.com/

The site claims 3061 complete books or stories by 320 authors, so happy listening.  If you have suggested sites for us, let us know.

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[6 - AV Voice Reader, Acoustica CD Burner and More...]
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Over the last few years we've collected a list of our favorite software programs that fit well with our products.  We've gathered these all onto one page at

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

Many of these have downloadable trial versions, and offer functionality that really work well with our programs or fit well with the interests of our typical users.  This month we'd like to highlight two of these programs in particular:

AV Voice Changer provides a variety of audio effects capable of drastically altering the sound of a voice, either live out of TextAloud or within an mp3 file.  This gives you virtually an unlimited number of sounds or personalities you can create.

Acoustica MP3 CD Burner is a full featured CD burner capable of taking MP3 files created by TextAloud and our other programs and burns them onto audio CDs which can be played back in any CD Player.

Other programs on our partners page include functions from Translation, Telephone Answering, Creating Talking Pictures, Recording Radio Shows, and editing audio files.  Please check out all of these interesting products at

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

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[7 - NextUp Talker Reminder]
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Just a reminder, we are still trying to spread the word about our NextUp Talker program.  This program is specifically designed for people who have trouble speaking, and offers great sounding speech for those who can no longer talk.  Compared to specialized devices which can cost as much as $3000, NextUp Talker can literally change the life of those who need a communications aide.  If you know of anyone needing this type of product, please let them know about NextUP Talker at

http://www.talkforme.com

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[8 - Enter to Win a NextUp.com Golf Shirt]
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All you have to do to enter is tell us the improvement or improvements you would most like to see in our TextAloud software.  Please include your shirt size and send your email to

newsletterdrawing@nextup.com

We'll draw a winner from entries received by Friday, September 16 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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