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Torah Readers Tikun Teacher already does plenty of what our target audience is requiring from an online interactive Torah chanting and learning program.  The questions we get more often than any other are, what are we doing next? Where are we taking the program? In short, what can we expect in the near future.

Where are we coming from?

These are great questions and in fact we have a very defined roadmap layed out so we are in a good place to share our vision and our product roadmap. When we started thinking about Torah Readers, (https://torahreaders.net) several years ago, in fact the concept of Torah Readers was intended to be a place where not only people could signup for Torah readings, but also learn their reading portion inside the program. In fact we anticipated that most people would use Torah Readers to view the Tikun and listen to a recording of the parasha and thereby learn to read their portion.

This didn't happen for many reasons, mostly because using Trope Trainer to generate PDF files for every single full and triennial reading was a massive task. These files also weren't interactive and instead just provided a static view of the Tikun. The other major problem was getting the voice recording files that were required for every reading - both full, triennial and weekday - don't forget holiday recordings as well and remember that sometimes holidays fall on Shabbat and have specific readings. This actually adds up to well over 2,000 recordings!!!

Regardless, Torah Readers has its place and is used by many Temples to help schedule torah reading assignments and davening assignments.

One of the biggest benefits that Trope Trainer could boast was having recordings for every reading schedule and in many different voices, pitches and every possible tune - i.e. Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Moroccan, Yemenite, etc. They achieved this in the cases of pitch, male/female by synthesizing electronically the voice recordings that they already had. They also had one other thing that new companies don't have - time. Trope Trainer was developed over many, many years. They were always improving and implementing new capabilities. Trope Trainer is done now - it's left this world just as it's sole developer has.

What have we done?

When looking at Torah Readers and then Tikun Teacher we never intended to replicate how Trope Trainer worked; we felt that we could do it much better and more suited to the modern world. First, we decided that it would be a web based application with no requirement for installation. Next, simplicity in all things: what this means is that we understand that there is a ton of complexity in Torah Reading, reading schedules and what gets read and when. We figured we can remove the complexity from the users and hide it all behind the scenes. For this reason we developed the most simplistic and easy to use search interface - both for Torah readers and for Tikun Teacher.

The next change we looked at was having a set pricing model with subscription pricing. In the case of Torah Readers, this is an annual licensing charge and for Tikun Teacher its a monthly subscription that can be canceled at any moment.

So What's next?

We have a long list of accomplishments so far:

1. Indexed every letter of the Torah and built a system to create sentences and paragraphs as required.

2. Created functionality that defines the interactive Tikun

3. Indexed every Haftarah

4. Created recordings for full version of torah reading and every haftarah

5. Uploaded all the megilot and added voice recordings for every verse.

6. Correctly get all parshiot for different reading schedules

7. Implemented a secure environment and automatic payment subscription service

There's still many things left to do though! For instance our current project is working with multiple people to get every Triennial recording in both male and female voices. Then we need to focus on providing recordings for our Sephardi customers. We want to focus on the print layout as well - we know that most people like a print out of the Tikun view and we want to make a lot of improvements to that view by giving our users many options to format it.

We need to provide settings for the users so that their system will remember their preferences. All of this and a lot more will get done over the coming weeks and months.

The truth is that this solution is architected from the ground up to be fast, user friendly and secure. Every single line of code was written with these three ideas in mind and it is already proving to be paying off - so far everyone who has subscribed is saying good things about Torah Readers Tikun Teacher!