SpeakEz [review]
POS:
Testing has indicated that it will increase engagementNEG:
In my tests it conflicted with some existing site code, for example it conflicts with this sites WordPress theme.Today Im writing my full review of a new software called “SpeakEz” The first logical question is going to be: What exactly is SpeakEz? Well, its a cloud based text to speech software that allows you to put a play button on your website. When people press the play button the system will read […]
Today Im writing my full review of a new software called “SpeakEz”
The first logical question is going to be: What exactly is SpeakEz? Well, its a cloud based text to speech software that allows you to put a play button on your website. When people press the play button the system will read the text to them, so they can listen to it, instead of having to read it themselves. Perhaps the easiest way to explain this software is to just show it to you. If you click here, you will be taken to my testing blog where you can see one of my tests of this software.
The software is super easy to use. Its fully cloud based. After logging into your account on its website you simple create a campaign. A campaign is basically the settings that you want for your text to speech. You can make multiple campaigns if you like and you can also use the same campaign on multiple websites.
The main thing you will be concerned with when creating your account is choosing the voice that the text to speech engine will use when SpeakEz reads your website content to your site visitors. There are several voices broken up in to ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories. You will also notice that there a few voices with no English language options.
Originally I thought that the non English languages only read the text with an accent, however I realized that this was only because I was using a non English voice with the English text I was writing. If you do that you will hear English with an accent, however if you use a non English voice with text written in non English it will speak the non English language. For example if I chose the voice “Marline” which is German and have it read English text then it sounds like a German person reading English with an accent. However if I have it read German text it reads proper German (disclaimer: it has been a long time since I took German in highschool so I will not comment on the pronunciation accuracy of the non English voices when reading non English languages)
There are voices that support the following language options: English, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Icelandic, Dutch, Japanese, Danish, Norwegian and Spanish. Just make sure you select a voice that matches the language you want SpeakEz to read, if not it will not sound good. (this is actually a mistake that I initially made in testing)
Besides selecting your voice when creating your account you can also adjust the voices reading speed and link to a custom play button. The play button is one thing I did not like about this section. Notice I said you can link to a custom play button. Im not a big fan of that. It seems silly to make the user host a custom button somewhere else. They should have had an upload function that allowed you to just upload your custom button to their site if you wanted.
After saving your campaign you will be taken to the main dashboard:
From here you can click the ‘script’ button which will give you a very shot bit of code that you can put on any website to add the SpeakEz text to speech functionality. You can click ‘stats’ button to see how many people are clicking your speech play button (and where they are located) and of course you can click edit or delete.
SpeakEz works well and as described but I was interested in more than if it just works. I was interested in learning if people would actually prefer to hear a site as opposed to reading it themselves. I wanted to know if it would actually increase engagement. So I posted a link to one of my tests on my Facebook group and asked thousands of people to check it out and let me know if they liked the system, and specifically if they liked having the text to speech engine read to them as opposed to reading the demo article themselves. Boy did they respond. In the twenty four hours that I invited people to give me their feedback I got dozens and dozens of responses.
Some were good, some were bad. Over all though about 50% of the people said they enjoyed having SpeakEz read to them, the other half said they preferred reading themselves, did not like the voice I selected, or did not like text to speech in general. At first I was thinking to myself: “Eh ok about 1/2 like being read to, thats pretty good, but 1/2 dont like it so that kind of sucks, not sure if I should approve this or not”. But then I realized something. If you DONT have this on your site the 1/2 that like being read to and who feel it increased their engagement will not get that opportunity at all, it will never be presented to them. However if you DO have it on your site, they will get that opportunity without effecting the 1/2 that prefer to read themselves because the ones who prefer to read themselves simply wont press the play button. In effect not using this prevents 1/2 of the people from getting what they want, while using it gives them what they want without effecting the other half in any way.
Seems pretty simple to me, if you can make a bunch of people happy, more engaged, and more likely to absorb your content without effecting the other people in any way why wouldn’t you? Once I realized that my final judgement of SpeakEz was very simple to make:
Bonus: There are a few bonuses that everyone who buys SpeakEz will get regardless of who they buy it through however I wanted to give something extra special for my readers, so Im including a special bonus, a WordPress plugin that I wrote specifically for this very website to help be capture random traffic and build my email list from it. In fact you may have seen it on this site. Watch the video below for a quick demo:
A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.
About the Author
Glad I scrolled down. I like the slide capture app, not so much the speakez. We really like your “non-hype” style. Thanks,
Future IM Person 🙂
Bought it through your link. But got something else to tell you. I noticed when I click on your logo on top of your site (the dogs head), I get linked to nowhere, the site keeps spinning and I see a blanc screen.Just wanted to tell you that.
Bug in my site , I fixed it, thanks!