Watch out podcasters! Here come the web-based services, that can replace your line of work! As promised before, I'm going to introduce Odiogo; a free web service that is capable to translate all of your registered weblogs from text into speech. To use this text-to-speech service, all you’ve got to do is sign-up for an account at Odiogo web page; and you’ll be guided with its wizard to set up its service at your weblog.
I’ve tried it with myself on this weblog, and I have to say that I’m very impressed by how fast Odiogo to turn all of my blogs into podcasts. Just about 3-7 minutes, I can already listen to my very own podcast. But I suppose you’ll get longer time, depending on how many blogs you have. Odiogo will place an integrated player at each of your blogs, where you can listen directly from the web browser. There’ll be an option of putting an Odiogo icon at your weblog, so your readers will be able to subscribe to your podcasts. If you have weblogs at Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad, BlogEngine, Terapad, etc.; Odiogo has provided full support and easy integration.It’s a very good option for bloggers, since you can reach not only readers but also those who love to tune in to podcasts. Odiogo’s free service is not without merit of its own, but one particular annoying when I listen to Odiogo with the integrated player is that there’s no volume controller. So you’ll need to turn down the OS volume, if you don’t want to hear it too loud. Besides that, the integrated player offers you shortcuts to download the podcast as MP3 file, subscribe it to iTunes or Juice, etc.
But for you who don’t own a weblog or just wish to listen to podcasts from your favorite RSS feeds, then you may use Dixero to do so. Dixero will also convert any RSS feeds text into podcasts, you can put Dixero’s RSS feed like you do it with another RSS feeds in your mobile phone’s aggregator app. Too bad Dixero doesn’t provide a support to embed it to another sites, otherwise it would be cool to have it at your own weblog or Facebook account. Unlike Odiogo, with Dixero you can choose three different types of voices available.Both of the web service above: Odiogo & Dixero, have almost the same digital voice quality; the speech produced is computerized. So for you who prefer voice with “human-touch”, you might find it more boring compared to the real podcast. Although there are still some mistakes in the pronunciations, overall I’m quite impressed on how the digital speech able to deliver an understandable podcast even one that I thought hard to be translated.
[blogged with my Treo 750v]
2 comments:
You should also check out a couple of services that we have developed. One is the www.audiofeedcreator.com that I created for a couple of years ago. However, we are now focusing the development on our new service www.vocalfruits.com where we shortly will add support for some more languages and better user interface and make it totally free. Both services are about converting RSS feeds into podcasts. VocalFruits also have the feature to aggregate items from a number of feeds into one, and also the possibility to send an email directly to the feed to update it. Perfect for speech-bloggers on the run. What we do now is to take the best out of the two services to further improve the VocalFruits platform.
Since me and my team developed the ReadSpeaker services back in 2001 we have been dedicated to work with the best text-to-speech engines on the market, even if it means using a number of different TTS suppliers and platforms. On top of that we have worked for years with an additional layer of reading improvements to make it even a better user experience.
We started already in 1999 and were originally working from an web accessibility perspective only, but over the years, as TTS have improved, we are now targeting the broad audience. However, we are always dedicated to our mission to make life easier for all the ones that have a hard time reading text, whatever the reason may be.
Keep updated on what new cool services we will launch soon; http://blog.rspeak.com
Wow, thanks nikko!
Your VocalFruits service looks very tempting, and I'm using it right now as I speak.
I hope it'll flourish and grow bigger in the future, good luck!
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