Podcasting: Acapela reads you Germany's most popular daily paper.

The on-line version of the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung is now also read aloud by Acapela's High Quality speech synthesis and made available by its partner Readspeaker, leader of voice-on-the-web services. This new service, WAZ-Audionews, has just been launched by the newspaper. Listen to the latest news in finance, politics or sport! The WAZ-Audionews service is free of charge, and allows users to pick the news they want to hear, obtain their personal podcast, and listen to it on their mp3 player. WAZ-Audionews gives its users a fast, easy and innovative way to follow the news in the most natural way: by listening to it.

The launch of this new service answers to the growing demand of readers who are developing a taste for take-away mp3 audio content, to listen to when and where they want, whether travelling or to continue to access information while giving their eyes a rest.

The WAZ-Audionews service was developed with "Readspeaker Publishers" the only European ASP to provide on-the-fly website vocalization and automatic podcast creation. The voice of this new service is Sarah, Acapela's German High Quality synthetic voice. Sarah reads the news with a smooth, natural, harmonious voice, adapting to the rhythm of the text while respecting intonation and punctuation.

"We are very happy to offer this new Audionews service to our readers, and so continue to inform them, even in situations where reading a newspaper would be uncomfortable or impossible.", says Reinhard Werbeck, CEO of Cityweb Network, the on-line branch of WAZ. "Our collaboration with Readspeaker and Acapela has been especially productive, and we are now able to provide a high quality audio service for our on-line readers that respects the high standards of WAZ."

"Readspeaker is proud to provide this Audionews service for the readers of WAZ, offering them a brand new innovative solution to access information. The users can request precisely the news that they are interested in." explains Ulf Beyschlag, CEO of Readspeaker. "Acapela's speech synthesis gives a voice to WAZ Audionews and automatically turns written data into pleasant and perfectly intelligible audio output."