ReadSpeaker Launches Web-Based Math Audio Reader

ReadSpeaker today launched a new feature to help learners who want to listen to math courses or any online content that uses mathematical notations.

Now, learning, teaching and research Web sites worldwide can propose a talking version of their mathematical content to help their end users who have problems reading better understand and learn.

ReadSpeaker has developed a system that reads aloud mathematical notations in the World Wide Web Consortium standard MathML language or presented as text (ASCII). ReadSpeaker has developed a collection of rules to read presentation MathML, which currently is the most used part of the MathML language, as well as a dictionary for an improved reading of text based expressions.

The ReadSpeaker framework that comes out of the box can be customized for specific customer needs. For example, customers might want some mathematical expressions to be read out loud in a certain way depending on the knowledge level of the end users they are targeting. This level of personalization is now available with theReadSpeaker Enterprise solution that features the math reading.

ReadSpeaker can read the 100 most common mathematical symbols by default and can add others on demand for customers. This includes small and capital Latin letters, the most common small Greek letters, some operators like Nabla, integrals, differentials, sums, products and coproducts, arrows, etc. In ASCII math representation, ReadSpeaker reads standard functions like trigonometry and logarithms, as well as simple fractions using slashes, parentheses, simple exponents and indices using ^ and other standard ones. Algebra like a+b, b-c, xy, p*q and simple square roots are read.

And ReadSpeaker will read it like this:

"x equals, fraction, minus b plus minus square root of, b squared minus 4 a c, divided by 2 a."

"This is the first on-demand, device independent and streaming web service on the market that speech-enables advanced math in a natural way using the latest online text-to-speech technology," says Niclas Bergstrom, ReadSpeaker founder and CEO.