Sound Surfer Books

Sound Surfer Books™ is an experimental voice activated interactive book reader, media player, vocal web browser and more! Sound Surfer Books uses text to speech and voice recognition technology to simulate a live storyteller / book reader, radio announcer or disk jockey that (who) you can talk to. It is designed to be used in situations where it is inconvenient or possibly dangerous to spend much time looking at your device. With Song Surfer Books selecting what music to play is as simple as pressing the command button in the lower right and saying "Play classical", "Play Beatles and Stones" or "Query bridge by Simon and Garfunkel". Sound Surfer Books not only plays music, it can read headlines and full stories from news sources on the web. To do so just say something like "Read Reuters" or "Read BBC". Sound Surfer also allows you to do full searches using search engines such as Bing.com by saying something like "Look up Beethoven on the web". It will read back the results. Press the "read this" key or the command button and say "read this" and it will try to retrieve the article. The latest version adds the ability to download and read books from Gutenberg.org. Just say "read Moby Dick" and it will download and read it! To listen to the last book you were "reading" just say "Read" or "Last". It's that simple. (requires data connection and uses up to 6 megabytes at time of first download). It can also read any book or text file in text format. Simply put it in a directory with the word "book" somewhere in the path. Playback of .pdf and other types of files is planned for future versions. You can say "Help" to get help at any time. When you are done say "goodbye" or press the power button to exit.

Sound Surfer Books will probably not replace your favorite music player, web browser or book reader. It doesn't have a lot of fancy controls. It's appeal is in it's simplicity and focus on vocal interaction and control.

Please download and try it.

You can send suggestions, bug reports and constructive criticisms to SoundSurferSuggestions@WabanSurf.com. (Please note that all ideas, suggestions, criticisms, reports, etc. become the sole property of WabanSurf.com, Waban Group, LLC. and any related entities without recourse.)

Note: This app requires a text to speech engine. All our testing and development was done with Ivona's text to speech app and the Ivona Amy UK English voice which can be downloaded from the Play Store. Feel free to use whatever you like though.