Prestigious ‘Goncourt’ & ‘Renaudot’ French literary awards are already available to visually impaired users.

We are happy – together with the AVH – to share with you a new episode of our success story started this summer. After the introduction of Alice as the synthetic voice of Éole’s AVH digital library, and the quick availability of freshly released books thanks to the text to speech vocalization capability, the AVH is now demonstrating that he can provide access to the newly awarded novels to it users with no delay.

‘Goncourt’ and ‘Renaudot’ are the first prizes to open the ball and the AVH will continue to display on its digital book shelves the awarded books of the literary season as they will be attributed. And at the same time than for printed book readers!

With the recent introduction in its digital library ‘Éole’ of audio books in Daisy format read by Acapela’s synthetic voice, AVH can now very quickly make new titles available to its users, as synthetic voice enables written content to be vocalized rapidly.

‘The use of new technologies like synthetic voice allows us to keep up with what’s happening in literature and offers our users the very latest novels that everyone is talking about; without delay. It’s a big first that we are proud of. The resulting audio is very pleasant and the borrowing rate for titles vocalized by synthetic voices, available for two months now, is very encouraging’ said Fernando Pinto da Silva, from the AVH.

To listen to extracts of the ‘Gouncourt’ and ‘Renaudot’ prizes, read by Alice, the Acapela synthetic voice selected by AVH to vocalize literary works, just click on the links below:

• Sample n°1: “Au revoir là-haut”, Pierre Lemaitre
• Sample n°2: “Naissance”, Yann Moix (min)

Click on the links for more information about the AVH and Éole