HOLD FOR RELEASE UNTIL MAY 7 2015

New version of Soccer Aloud app Available May 9, 2015 and FREE for a limited time

A new version of Soccer Aloud for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch is available FREE on the App Store from Saturday, May 9, 2015 for a limited time

There's an app for reading football/soccer websites aloud to you. It's called 'Soccer Aloud' and the new version for iPhone and other iOS 8 devices is available FREE for a limited time.

Seattle, Washington - May 4, 2015 - Available on Saturday May 9th, 2015, the app Soccer Aloud lets iPhone-using football fans enjoy their favorite soccer-related websites with their ears at no cost for a limited time.

Soccer Aloud takes English text and reads it aloud as English-accented speech, to entertain and inform soccer addicts around the world whether they are traveling or training, commuting or cooking, kicking back on the couch or kicking a ball on a field.

“There's some brilliant football writing from the UK national newspapers, the big US sports television sites, and hundreds of high quality independent blogs” said Alex Stockton, designer of Soccer Aloud. “We thought ‘Wouldn't it be great if you could listen to that writing instead of reading it?’ If you're tired, or commuting, or doing chores, reading yourself isn't practical. We created Soccer Aloud so that people could take unproductive time and make it fun. Football is hugely popular. With a massive fanbase in the UK and a growing audience in the US, it's time that footy fans got innovative apps tailored to their interests.”

Users download web pages using the Soccer Aloud extension from within the Safari web browser and listen to them with the Soccer Aloud app. Once pages are downloaded, users can listen to them without a network connection. Pages are analyzed by Soccer Aloud to extract just the article. Important features of football articles like teams, scores, formations, and players are recognized to ensure the best quality speech.

The new version builds on the high quality text-to-speech already in the app and adds a reading view that lets users see the text of the articles they have saved.

Talking about some of the technical challenges involved in creating an app that has to deal with all the variety and richness of the English language, the designer of Soccer Aloud had this to say:

“There's a ton of detail that you need to get right to read football news aloud - to make it convincing. And that's our focus - providing a great listening experience to soccer fans. It's more than just pronouncing team names correctly, or reading scores in the right order - which we do - there are also over 5000 heuristics built in to Soccer Aloud to improve the speech. We built a markup parser, tokenizers and recognizers, a football language parser, syntax trees - it's really deep technically. We've got some sophisticated text processing going on, but users of the app won't see that - I think people are just going to enjoy hearing the results.”

Sounds like a lot of work. Has the effort been worth it?

“It's totally worth the effort. I fall asleep every night listening to Soccer Aloud.”

The new version of Soccer Aloud is available ahead of the FA Cup Final in England on Saturday, May 30, 2015, and the FIFA Women's World Cup beginning in Canada on Saturday, June 6, 2015,. It's always a good time to be a football fan with Soccer Aloud.

Version 1.9.1 of the Soccer Aloud app is available to English speakers in all regions supported by the App Store. Soccer Aloud runs on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch with iOS 8.

Please visit soccer-aloud.com for more information including speech samples, videos, and screenshots of the app.

Soccer Aloud is designed and developed by Callionica LLC in Seattle, Washington. Callionica LLC is an independent software development company founded in 2012.

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