About...

Principle

Readaid aims to harness the text-to-speech functionality available in the Microsoft Edge browser to provide writers with auditory assistance for the editing, revision, and/or proofreading stages of their work. For some, this may turn out to be a tedious task after hours of sourcing, drafting, composing, researching, referencing and presumably typing. 

The functionality is also available in MS Word and MS Outlook and, on personal computers, can be configured to support multilingualism. On organization-managed machines, it is provided in the default MS Office language, but system-administrator privileges or a department-wide rollout are required for such settings tweaks as adding a language (Arabic in my case, let me know what happens when you email IT with a request in that regard).

Readaid is completely cloud-based and infrastructure-safe (i.e., the organization's framework provides cybersecurity). The value add-on is access to the full menu of MS voice-supported languages, which allows users to listen to (or hear) their content voiced back to them with little more than a couple clicks. 

Why it matters

At a reputable media organization where I worked in a previous life, writers (then called editors) exchanged drafts for SPOE-ing, which stood internally for submitting each paper to a Second Pair Of Eyes for final checks. Until quite recently, at my other reputable organization, team members responsible for proofreading sat in pairs at a certain table, red pen in hand, to read documents aloud to one another. I liked to call that activity proof-hearing or proof-listening.

Proofreading, typically the visual scrutiny of a pre-final, aims to detect errors for remedial. But listening/hearing puts content through a deeper investigative level that allows for potential improvements to such aspects as tone, register, phraseological conventions, and degrees of formality. It can help weed out vernacular statements posing as standard formulations, oxymorons hiding behind terminology, pseudo-technical social media lingo displacing plain prose, and I could go on a little further. In a word, as my favorite supervisor once said, aural/auditory reading, i.e., listening to/hearing print content brings out the musica in the writing. 

Limitations

Whereas Covid-19 and cost-cutting appear to have put an end to the luxury of relying on expert finalizers, computer-assisted proof-listening/proof-hearing are now with us. Readaid can in my view, as a moved-on educator in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), read at or above 8th-Grade level. 

Put simply, I am marking Readaid's overall recital performance at 80%. Artificial intelligence has not yet equipped it with fully-nuanced discerning capabilities. For instance, it would speak "and/or" as "and slash or", and "Resolution 76/5" as "Resolution seventy-six fifths". In Arabic, where most diacritics are hidden, this limitation begs for indulgence. Speakers of other languages will surely identify other case-specific shortcomings.