NextUp.com - Press Release - Making Email Talk with NextUp.com's TextAloud

For Release Thursday, July 21, 2005

Making Email Talk with NextUp.com's TextAloud

New TextAloud Toolbar Makes Listening to Email Easier Than Ever for Outlook® Users

CLEMMONS, NC — NextUp.com (www.NextUp.com)announces the release of TextAloud 2.051, an update to the leading text-to-speech software tool for consumers, educators, and business customers. TextAloud converts text into spoken audio for listening on a PC, and can also save to MP3/Windows Media files for easy playback on portables like the iPod®, or use in the creation of Podcasts. This newest version of TextAloud offers new and specific enhancements for users who use the program to listen to their emails in Microsoft Outlook®.

Thanks to TextAloud, users can listen to their email read aloud with a variety of available premium text-to-speech voices. In TextAloud 2.051, the new toolbar provides the user with easy, friendly VCR-like controls as well as voice selection options, making it easier than ever to select and hear email messages while working in Outlook®.

"Email has become an important and nearly universal part of most people's lives over the last few years," comments Rick Ellis, President of NextUp.com. "With TextAloud's seamless new integration with Outlook, now users can easily listen to their emails instead of spending all day reading them."

Other new features in TextAloud 2.051 include:
• An improved File-Splitter Utility to facilitate handling of larger text documents
• Enhancements to the Batch File Converter for processing multiple documents with ease
• Support for new additional premium voices from NeoSpeech® and Cepstral®
• Additional proofreading features and capabilities, to help writers produce error-free documents.

About TextAloud 2.051
Recently nominated for a 2005 Shareware Industry Association Award, TextAloud is a full-featured Text-to-Speech tool offering direct support for Word, PDF and HTML formats, as well as advanced pronunciation tools, an Internet Explorer Plug-In for easy listening of favorite web pages - and more. TextAloud is also used by many to create a podcast from text content.

Hailed by critics and users alike, TextAloud is priced at just $29.95, and is compatible with systems using Windows® 98, NT, 2000 and XP. The program is available for fast, safe and secure purchase via http://www.NextUp.com.

NextUp.com also offers TextAloud with optional premium voices from AT&T Natural Voices™, NeoSpeech and Cepstral® for the most natural-sounding computer speech anywhere.

About NextUp.com
NextUp.com, a division of NextUp Technologies, LLC, provides award-winning Text-to-Speech software for consumers, business customers, educators, and those with visual impairment or learning disabilities.

In addition to TextAloud, NextUp.com markets other innovative Windows software designed to save time and deliver vital information. NewsAloud™ is a talking personal "news agent" that finds the stories users want, and then reads them aloud or to portable MP3 files. WeatherAloud™ is a weather application that lets users select and listen to personalized weather forecasts, while StocksAloud™ reads stock updates and related news headlines aloud for specific companies of interest. Most recently, NextUp also released NextUp Talker 1.0, an easy and affordable program that allows people who have lost their voices to use the latest in high-quality computer voices to communicate with others.

Evaluation copies of TextAloud 2.0 are currently available upon request. To receive a review copy, or for more information on NextUp.com or TextAloud, please contact Rick Ellis at rdellis@nextup.com.

All companies and products referenced in this press release, including TextAloud™, iPod®, Rio®, Outlook®, Windows®, and more are the trademarks of their respective owners.

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