Opinion: Who's got time to actually read documents these days? New software from ScanSoft lets you convert your PDFs to WAV or AIFF and listen to them on the go.
"Time Is Tight" says the title of one of my favorite Booker T & the MGs tunes. At the moment, I'm taking lessons from a jazz master—tuning up my keyboard improvisational skills so I can eventually hack my way through some Booker tunes in a throwback soul-jazz group, manning the Hammond.
At first, my teacher found it interesting that I record my weekly lesson with him to a DVR (digital voice recorder), dump it on my computer and rip it to my iPod to review some of these new-to-me concepts—like chord voicings, harmonic rhythm and such—while I'm out walking our dogs.
Seems like a big, convoluted runaround, he suggested, when I first explained it to him.
But two months later, he's gotten himself a DVR to listen to his Spanish-language tutorial tapes ("A year from now, I want to speak as well as a 5-year-old growing up in a Spanish-speaking country," he says) while he's exercising.
Why do we do two things at once? Because time is tight. Seems like we waste half our lives sitting in traffic because the homes are too expensive near where we work, and the jobs where we live don't pay enough.
So what if you could do the same thing to PDFs? Forget about reading them—just save them to WAV format and rip them to your iPod. Or burn them to AIFF and play them over your car stereo's CD player in traffic while driving to and from work.
ScanSoft, which has been acquiring companies left and right for years as the speech technologies market consolidates, has enabled such a rip-mix-burn capability in its OmniPage 15 optical-character recognition software, released last week.
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. 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.
The Peabody, Mass.-based company didn't incorporate talking documents into OmniPage just to prove to the world it could, or to entertain ex-SpeechWorks engineers. Strammiello said a group of doctors in one of ScanSoft's focus groups—the medical market represents one of the company's key verticals—asked for the feature.
"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.
The whole idea of taking documents in a digital format and moving them back to an analog format seems contradictory to the spirit of PDF, which liberates knowledge managers from paper—on desks, in filing cabinets and warehouses stuffed full of the stuff. It seems ironic, no?
"I don't think it's ironic," Strammiello said. "One of the things that ScanSoft endeavors to do is take paper processes and streamline them, make them more efficient by supplanting them with digital, electronic processes. But one of the things that can also be done is making electronic processes even more efficient . . . supplanting inefficient electronic processes with more efficient, more convenient and more flexible ones. I think that's a natural evolution."
After all, time is tight. The more high-tech innovations we can use to save a few minutes, the better.
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