We have introduced 2 male and 2 female avatars which members can select to read out their recordings.

You can select your avatar settings once you log into your My Recordings screen.  When you click on Play Avatar icon below each recording, depending on the voice used  the male or female avatar will popup and read the recording. Please note that recordings older than May20th,2008 will not work with avatars as that functionality was built in late

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 got a couple of people who are creating French recordings - they say there is some problem in the french pronunciation of certain words. We would like to hear from others who are having similar problems with French. It would help us a lot to find if there is an issue which can be fixed at our end.

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.

We have instructions for you here

Some users were facing the problem of an error page coming up when they tried to delete a recording. This was caused by an experimental module we have put up which created an xml file for each recording. This error has been fixed now.  

We want to hear from our members if they are using the IPod download link and if the downloaded RSS file is giving any problems  We are working on making the integration with Itunes more smooth and transparent.

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.