As a leading AI text-to-speech service provider based in Canada, NaturalReader innovates with the power of AI to improve education for millions of students globally. The 25-employee company aimed both at scaling up to meet the demand of a booming education technology market and at enhancing the quality of its product to reach more students. With the help of Microsoft Azure, it improved the authenticity of its AI voices and developed a mobile app so that students can access the service anytime and anywhere. As a result, NaturalReader increased global sales by 100 percent from 2022 to 2023 and welcomed several Ivy League colleges as customers.
NaturalReader is a small Canadian company with a big mission: to make education more accessible with a natural-sounding text-to-speech (TTS) service. It faced the twin challenges of developing a higher-quality product that students would love while scaling up to meet rapidly growing demand in the educational accessibility market. Using solutions available through Microsoft Azure, NaturalReader is now helping millions of students around the world pursue their education.
NaturalReader had already used Microsoft technology to develop its TTS application, which helps students with learning differences access reading materials. But the company wanted to go further in reducing barriers to learning. After it built AI into its service, sales grew, downloads surged, and the company won the Microsoft Canada AI Impact Award for its innovation.
Making education accessible for students
Jeff Yang developed NaturalReader while attending college. His solution to the overwhelming amount of reading required of him was to create a TTS application and learn by listening to the content. After gaining his degree, Yang founded NaturalReader to help more students like himself.
Students with learning disabilities like dyslexia can face serious challenges when it comes to reading text, and educational institutions are keen to break down these barriers. While TTS services can help such students reach their full potential, mechanical-sounding computer-generated voices are unhelpful and distract listeners from the content. “Ask any TTS company,” says Graham Smith, Marketing Coordinator at NaturalReader. “Voice quality is their most important thing.” Many TTS tools also require large software downloads, take a long time to install, and cannot be accessed from mobile devices.
To help more students and increase sales, NaturalReader needed to develop a set of diverse, natural-sounding voices and an easy way for students to use the service, both at their desks and on the go. It was also important to offer this service at a price schools could afford. Thanks to its long history of using Microsoft solutions, NaturalReader saw an opportunity to use AI to improve the quality of its product and to rapidly scale the business for a global audience.
Improving voices with Azure AI
When synthesized speech sounds too robotic, listeners have a harder time focusing on the content. NaturalReader believed AI was the key to improving its TTS service and driving sales growth. The company used Azure AI services to build a new set of diverse computer-generated voices that could convert text into natural speech. “The fact that Microsoft helps us fulfill our number-one need—voice quality—is massive for us as a company,” says Smith.
The Azure AI implementation was seamless, and NaturalReader made the new voices available to users quickly. “It’s quite difficult to offer high-quality voices at scale,” says Moad Ben-Suleiman, Software Engineer at NaturalReader. “But Microsoft has really helped us get the ball rolling on the TTS end and get the voices out to our customers.” Consequently, the company was able to meet the rising demand for high-quality educational technology tools. As sales grew, NaturalReader expanded its reach quickly and smoothly thanks to Microsoft’s swift responses to their technical queries.
Growing daily users from 20,000 to 60,000 in three years with Microsoft Azure
After adopting the new voices built with Azure AI services, NaturalReader saw a 100 percent increase in global sales from 2022 to 2023. More than 2,000 colleges and universities, some of which are Ivy League, now offer NaturalReader as a tool to their students. By using Azure, the company was able to focus both on driving growth and improving the quality of its service. Users have surged in number from 20,000 a day in 2020 to 60,000 a day in 2023, and educational institutions are thrilled with the new voice options. “The feedback we get from them is that it’s amazing how natural the voices are and how much the students love using them,” says Smith.
NaturalReader also uses Azure solutions in its mobile app as an optical character recognition scanner for physical text, so students can easily access the service away from their desks and learn on the go. “Now we can be with them in an actual real-life setting, whether they’re commuting to school, walking around campus, working out at the gym, or cooking dinner,” says Smith. As a result of the improvements, downloads of the TTS app have increased by 300 percent.
Using AI to empower students
NaturalReader hopes to continue its success by further deploying AI solutions in its products. For example, with the help of Azure OpenAI Service, the company hopes to interpret graphs, tables, and other visual representations of data for students. Making education accessible to all is the primary goal at NaturalReader, but the company also plans to extend its reach into other markets, including business training.
As demand for accessible and equitable education rises, NaturalReader is perfectly positioned to continue growing in this exciting space. The commitment Microsoft has made to educational inclusion was key to the success of these innovations. “When you have two companies that both have the same view on AI and technology, amazing things can happen for a lot of people around the world,” says Smith.
“The fact that Microsoft helps us fulfill our number-one need—voice quality—is massive for us as a company.”
Graham Smith, Marketing Coordinator, NaturalReader
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