Most text-to-audio solutions are fairly robotic, and therefore unfriendly for extended listening, says Roche. Typical text-to-audio solutions are based on phonetic reading; the voice program breaks words into their phonemes and strings together sounds to make words, with no sense of meaning or emphasis. So the interns looked for a solution that sounds more natural. They had actors come to a studio to read 60,000 to 80,000 words, which are then configured according to the text. Because the words sounded far more natural, the team found during testing, people were much more likely to listen to the whole program.

Listeners have a choice of male or female voices (which can be switched for different segments of the program), and can have the text read in English (with different accents), German or Spanish.

Roche says that IBM didn't initially outline the project as one that uses music, "but students said not having music is a crazy gap." The student team changed the project at the beginning. "What they ended up creating is a system that could be configured such that, my commute is this long, [so] I want 10 minutes of news feeds, 10 e-mail, then the rest can be music or whatever else they want," says Roche.

Roche points out that innovation and synergy are sparked by the diversity in technological interest and expertise and business savvy among the students, and the mentors benefit from that. "We learn a lot every year," he says. "Every year there's a wider range of technology and solutions." He also notices the variations in students' ease of using the technology from year to year. This year's interns have an even greater exposure to Web 2.0 tools than last year's students, Roche says. "They have business cards; some are just [in their] third year in college, and they're already building business profiles for themselves on Web."

As for the Extreme Blue program itself, Roche believes the program has multiple benefits. Projects can result in products with important social value, such as algorithms for gene pattern matching to spot disease indicators. This year's project is to create in-home monitoring systems to verify that elderly patients are OK and moving about.

And, of course, the internship program gives students a (likely) once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create and innovate with as few barriers as possible. Then there's the innovation aspect of the program itself. "Several projects I've been involved with over the last five years would never have arisen from normal demands," says Roche.