elocance Free in the app store Free in Google Play Install now! Install now!

Glossary

Audio app

An amazing app (like elocance) that turns stuff to audio, magically. Now we can all feel like we've got tricks up our sleeve. This can also be anything from music, podcasts, and guided meditation apps. Think Spotify and Headspace.

Audio streaming

When audio sound is being sent to you in a constant flow but isn't downloaded. For example, elocance streams your written content back to you in the form of audio. Music apps are doing this with music and so are podcasts.

Content

Being happy :) Just kidding. We think of content as any form of written material online. This could be web articles, PDFs, blogs, online books, pictures, videos and posts shared on social media. While elocance is great for long read articles and other professional content, the reality is that written content is all around us.

Online reader

A digital bestie that reads your stuff to you out loud. This is also another way to say text to speech or text to voice because online readers typically use synthetic voices. Online readers can either be used on a desktop or through apps like elocance. They are very useful for many different types of people. For example, people with learning disabilities like dyslexia. Listening to the content can help them retain information without having to read it. Also, people with visual handicaps can benefit from this type of solution.

Podcast

A podcast is a digital audio program available on the internet. It's sort of like radio but usually focused on a specific topic. If you haven't listened to a podcast, then you represent the minority since over half of the U.S. population listens to them. Some famous podcasts include Serial, This American Life, Radiolab, The Daily by NYT and many more. Spotify helped make podcasts even more famous when it bought Gimlet, a podcast platform, for over $300million in 2017.

Playlist

A playlist is a list of video or audio files that are strung together. This is typically associated with music, however, with elocance, a playlist can be an assortment of chosen articles, documents turned to audio. For example, one can curate all the best articles on a specific topic like blockchain or artificial intelligence.

Professionals

Most likely someone like you. The busy people who are working hard everyday to balance everything from work, personal life, family and hobbies. Finding time during the day to fit in a workout, run errands and also put in a solid day at work leaves very little to no free time. This constant race to finish everything can leave one feeling unfulfilled. There are many interesting things to learn that once may have piqued our curiosity but now get buried under the to-do list. Text to speech now makes it easier to stimulate our minds with interesting ideas, thoughts and inspiration during our day.

Productivity Tool

Tools (like elocance) that are made to enhance or improve ones productivity by giving you super powers like being able to multi-task during your commute. There are many other productivity tools out there. For example, Blinkist lets you listen to book summaries of popular non-fiction books. Audible allows you to listen to full novels instead of reading. While these tools are focused on audio, there are also many tools out there to help with productivity at work. ToDoist and Evernote help you get your to-do lists in order so that you can properly prioritize tasks and coordinate with team members. Zapier helps you automize email responses. Otter is the opposite of elocance and is a speech to text tools that lets you record your voice and turn it into text - pretty genius for meeting notes :)

Smart assistants

Smart assistants refer to artifical intelligence software applications that are able to understand voice commands and complete various tasks based on how they are programmed. There are serveral popular virtual assistants on the market (like Amazon Alexa, Google Home and more) and 41% of the U.S. population reports having some sort of smart speaker in their home. Using smart assistants has become mainstream as these products continue to sound more human-like and do more tasks.

Speech to text

The opposite of elocance and a service that turns speech into text. Record your voice dictation and the speech-to-text services can translate it to text. This is very helpful to increase productivity and save time when writing recaps and meeting notes. It's also great for keeping a record of conversations or meetings from the past. Most services allow you to search all your text content to find information easily and to organize your content.

Synthetic voices

An artifically produced voice that is made to sound human, but is really computer-generated. There are many amazing companies working on this technology. The big ones are Amazon, IBM and Google. Amazon's Polly, Google Wavenet and IBM Watson are all open source products that are often used by businesses who need automated calling solutions but there are many other useful applications. In addition, these companies have virtual home assistant products (Alexa) which consist of hardware and software that allows the user to ask the virtual assistant anything from playing music to what the weather is, all by using their voice. In the last few years, these synthetic voices have continued to sound more and more lifelike. There are also lots of small companies that are working on creating their own lifelike, synthetic voices that sound very humanlike. For example, Wellsaid Labs in Seattle as well as Lyrebird in Canada.

Text to voice

A service that leverages synthetic voices to transform written content (text) to audio. This is the same idea as text to speech or TTS since all of these refer to synthetic voices. The text to voice technology has been around for a long time. You might remember Steve Jobs introducing the Lisa computer to audiences using a robotic, synthetic voice. However, this technology was first concieved with the intention to help visually impaired people get information.

Text reader

A text reader leverages TTS / text to voice and synthetic voices to read text out loud. This is the same as an online reader but there are some companies and versions that are also doing this offline. For example, Microsoft Word has a function that allows the user to have the content read out loud to them using a text reader.

TTS (Text to Speech)

TTS is the acronym that describes text to speech and text to voice. It's the same as text to voice or text reader.

Voice to text

This is the same as speech to text and uses softward to understand and analyze human voice and turn it into text.

elocance uses cookies to improve our services and analyse navigation habits. Check our Privacy Policy for more.

Got it