ReadAlong Studio Web Interface for Digital Interactive Storytelling

Aidan Pine, David Huggins-Daines, Eric Joanis, Patrick Littell, Marc Tessier, Delasie Torkornoo, Rebecca Knowles, Roland Kuhn, Delaney Lothian

Abstract: We develop an interactive web-based user interface for performing textspeech alignment and creating digital interactive “read-along audio books that highlight words as they are spoken and allow users to replay individual words when clicked. We build on an existing Python library for zero-shot multilingual textspeech alignment (Littell et al., 2022), extend it by exposing its functionality through a RESTful API, and rewrite the underlying speech recognition engine to run in the browser. The ReadAlong Studio Web App is open-source, user-friendly, prioritizes privacy and data sovereignty, allows for a variety of standard export formats, and is designed to work for the majority of the world’s languages.