Imagine this: you are scrolling on your news feed, and you come across a very interesting article. Halfway through reading it, you have to put your phone down – perhaps you are driving or doing something else where you need your hands. Obviously, this means you can't continue reading the article, which is a bummer because it was super engaging and you're beyond curious to find out how it ends. This situation happens to us all, and an Israeli startup wants to solve this problem for us. They even want to save you the time of having to go into whichever websites you rely on for your content, and simply make a podcast feed for you.
Succeeding at what Google has yet to do
The Israeli startup Trinity Audio has developed a system that, at the click of a button, will allow websites to “read” the articles’ content with a simple add-on “player”. Trinity's system already works with 125 languages and is based on the use of Text-to-Speech engines from third-party companies, including Google and Amazon.
The significant advantage of the system created by the Israeli startup is the fact that it is agnostic to the Text-to-Speech engines, so it essentially uses them but also gives them an upgrade. Trinity has a rule-based system and tools designed to significantly improve the way words are pronounced through the various engines.
One of the 125 languagesthat Trinity's system works with is Hebrew, and alongside the third-party Text-to-Speech engine it also works with a lexicon they created. Such integration allows companies working with Trinity to improve, in real-time, the way the system conceives certain words. In addition to letters, the system can even “read” different symbols that many languages, such as Hebrew, have regarding the pronunciation of the word, for a more accurate listening stream.
This is a significant advantage in the system's ability, which Google itself has not yet cracked. According to Google engineers we spoke with, this is one of the more significant problems preventing the official addition of Hebrew as one of the languages supported by Google's voice assistant. What’s more is that if the symbols somehow didn't help decipher what is written, Trinity's system can figure out how to pronounce the word by studying its phonetics (how each sound in the word behaves), although this is an option intended for more unusual cases - and one that relies on the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a tool that many do not know how to use it properly.
Any employee can use it
Trinity's product includes a short integration into the website's JS code but from then on is a No-Code product so that any of the company's employees can work with it. Along with the improved reading capabilities offered by Trinity's system, it brings several other interesting tools – including the ability to create a content recommendation engine for readers, advertising capabilities within its player, and turning articles into a Spotify playlist. For example, a website can decide that every article in a periodical section it uploads (weekly, monthly or anything else) will be sent directly to that playlist, and Trinity will even create an RSS feed for that "podcast" so that the readers (who are already listening) can receive a notification every time a “new episode” is uploaded.
In a conversation with Geektime, Oren Liberman, Trinity's product manager, says that Trinity has another tool called Editor, in which you can enter the new text that will be read by its system. Another advantage of the system is that you can choose the voice it uses, and the playback speed and the system make necessary edits for a heightened user experience. Liberman explained that the editor option makes it possible to produce something just from text with very high levels of customization.
Trinity was founded by Ron Jaworski (CEO) and operates under a public company called GoTo Mobility (you may know them as Car2Go). Trinity has 12 employees, of which 10 are in the development center in Israel. So far, the startup has raised $4 million from its parent company but said they aren't ruling out funding from venture capital funds in the future. As of today, the Israeli startup has paying customers.
