Completely free and with over 34,000 titles, RNIB’s ‘Talking Books’ service offers audio fiction and non-fiction content for members to access, borrow and enjoy. And now, thanks to a new partnership between the charity and Amazon, the thousands of members with the Alexa home voice assistant find they have a great new ‘skill’: accessing great audiobook pleasure, from the comfort of their living rooms—just by saying “Alexa, open RNIB Talking Books”.
To find out more, I had a quick Zoom-er with UKAAF Vice Chair Alison Long, who’s been at RNIB for over 30 years where she is Head of Consumer and Business Services at the organisation, managing its commercial contracting, consultancy, reading and retail services.
Hi there Alison, thanks for agreeing to tell us all about this interesting development in accessible content. Can you tell us a bit about you and what you do at RNIB first?
Delighted to: so, I’m head of consumer and business services at RNIB. What that means is that I look after our reading and retail services, which incorporates our Library, so Braille, audio, we also offer bespoke large and giant print, and increasingly digital solutions. We sell a wide range of specialist products for blind and partially sighted people, and we also have a digital curriculum service called Bookshare where we offer over 740,000 accessible textbooks and academic works for students. On the business side, we’re offering support to businesses to help them with their accessibility needs, which can range from documents and accessible billing for finance and utility companies, as well as websites and product testing. Essentially, it’s all about accessible information, products and services.
Great, thanks. What about RNIB Talking Books in particular; isn’t there some interesting history here?
Yes, Talking Books was created decades ago, in 1935, on what wasn’t even vinyl but still shellac, when we started to provide an audio book service to war-blinded soldiers of the First World War: the first ever Talking Book created was Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd! There’s been continuity and innovation ever since, from multi-track cassette, CD and USB stick. So, there’s a long history, and we’re now bringing it right up to date for the way people are increasingly accessing audio content, through Alexa. We really believe voice technology is the future.
Why now?
RNIB Talking Books on Alexa is something that we have been wanting to do for a little while, but we had to make some changes to our technical infrastructure to be able to do this. Last year we launched our online reading service, a new way for customers to download accessible books through the website and apps, and this is the next stage—offering access to RNIB’s collection through Alexa.
Plus, we know there is an appetite for digital formats, but not necessarily sitting at a computer. The average age of our postal service customers is about 83, for example, who are not necessarily smartphone users, but increasingly have a smart speaker device at home. In fact, we were actually getting a fair few calls from Library members asking, When can I start listening to books through my smart speaker?
Why did you choose Alexa? There are obviously other voice assistants and devices out there?
It’s just a case of Alexa first. We like to be agnostic and provide choice, so we hope to be on other platforms and devices in the future. This is very much our starting point with voice, and we expect to offer much more through voice services going forward.
Great. What was it like working with Amazon?
We work with those guys a lot, already, and they’re great and we absolutely view them as partners. They’ve recently developed an Alexa service so our customers can call our helpline through an Alexa device. It’s important to say we also worked with an Alexa skill development company in New Zealand, called Sonnar Interactive, and they were also a pleasure to work with: they had developed similar technology for our sister organisation over there. It was definitely developed in partnership, and we had a number of customers supporting us with testing the Skill at various stages.
Any reaction yet from Talking Books listeners?
Yes, and it’s been awesome—from ‘fantastic surprise’ to ‘absolutely loving it’, ‘simple to use’ and from people who are used to using Alexa already on how well-thought-out and how easy to use it is. So positive all round, and we’re already starting to get some feedback on what customers would like to see in future so we can develop it further.Brilliant! So, what’s next?
We are definitely thinking ahead. So there’s a bookshelf feature which is just being tested at the moment and that will enable people to keep a wish list, so if they come across a book or hear about a title from their friends and it’s available in the collection, they can add it to their bookshelf to read later. We also have a large range of newspapers and magazines that we’ll make available too. Later this year there’ll be ‘recommendations’ so users can build a wish list that they either select themselves or the system does it for them through this recommendations feature, based on author and genre preferences that they’ve provided. And then a little bit further down the line notifications: those of us who have a device at home know that there’s a notification feature, so you know when your Amazon delivery is going to be arriving—we’ll be able to notify readers of book awards, new bestsellers and authors, possibly even things like interviews with authors.
Sounds exciting: UKAAF wishes you the best of luck. Keep us posted!
