The new updated Firefox toolbar for ReadTheWords.com is here. For all those who have installed the older version, you have to uninstall the old version and install this version as the old version no longer works with the updated site. 

Download the Firefox toolbar v.2.0 here 

Download the xpi file from the link above. Open Firefox and go to File menu. Click on Open. Select this xpi file and run it.

There is a new image link called Play Avatar in the My Recordings page. Clicking on this link will open a popup window with an avatar which reads the recording with synchronized lip movements. We are still working on the avatar module for now. The current avatar is a female one. The male avatar should be up soon.

We have made some changes to the firefox toolbar. Please use the newer version now since the old one will not work properly anymore.

Download the 1.1 version of the toolbar here 

 Be sure  to clear your Firefox cache before starting the download as Firefox sometimes caches files and you may get the old file again. To clear cache, open Firefox and go to Tools->Clear Private Data . In the window, check Cache and click ok.

We have released a toolbar which can be plugged in to your Firefox browser.

 

Using this toolbar, you can access your ReadtheWords member account and create recordings on the fly from any web page in your browser. Simply select text in the current web page and click on Record Text. A generated mp3 file will ready for download within seconds. We have kept a limit of 500 characters for text now.

 Please note that you do not have to login or register to be able to record the text .

 The toolbar is going to undergo some changes and enhancements in the near future. We look forward to getting feedback from you about the toolbar. 

 Steps to download and install the ReadTheWords Firefox extension.

• Download the rtwtoolbar.xpi file from here and save it to your hard disk.
• Open Firefox and select the File ->Open menu option
• Select the xpi file and click on Install
• After restarting the browser, the toolbar should show up as shown above in the picture
• This version of the toolbar will work from Firefox v.1.5.* to Firefox v.2.5.* . We will test for compatibility with Firefox 3.0,which has been released 24 hrs back, and  upload an updated toolbar in the next few days.

For all those who haven't tried it yet, we have introduced the ability to add custom speech tags to enhance the generated speech.

The link to see the Tips sheet is in the Create Recordings screen as shown below

On clicking the link you get a list of speech tags with examples on how they affect the speech output.

We hope to hear from users if they found this feature useful.