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August 28, 2007
Odiogo: Turns Blogs into Podcasts
The folks from Odiogo got my attention when they turned a number of my recent blog posts into podcasts.
One feature I would like to see added would be to have blog comments also read by Odiogo. There are times when the comments to a blog post are more interesting to read than the original underlying blog post.
Odiogo’s text to speech technology does a pretty nice job when reading my blogs. Please feel free to give Odiogo a try and share your experiences.
Tags: Odiogo, Social Media, Jeff Pulver
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Posted by jeff on August 28, 2007 11:26 PM | Permalink
Additional resources: Watch PrimeTime TV Shows | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos
Comments
Jeff - We agree with you on the comments part and we'll be adding comments vocalization as an option in a forthcoming release.
Richard - You're right. As shown from the thousands of downloads we experience on a daily basis, this application is convenient for relatively short news items or blog posts. A human interpretation is required for longer (and more complex) stories. This is confirmed by The Economist's decision to use professional broadcasters and actors to read out loud every week's edition (http://www.economist.com/audioedition/) And yes... they charge non-subscribers $8 per issue.
Mike - Metrics are on their way. First to your Inbox and soon into a full-fledged Account Management module.
-Marc
Posted by: Marc Kawam at September 3, 2007 10:28 AM
Like many speech technologies, this makes a good demo and is interesting to try once or twice, but users quickly suffer from listener fatigue if you use it for a while. The voice is just too monotonous for long readings.
Also see http://www.readspeaker.com, which does this for web sites.
Reuters uses a computer-generated voice for its up-to-the-minute news podcasts:
http://www.reuters.com/tools/podcasts/audio
but you'll quickly get tired of it.
Posted by: Richard Sprague at August 31, 2007 05:55 PM
I have been using Odiogo since the beginning of the year on my blog - www.thehotiron.com - and I think it's a nice add-on to my site. I did an initial test and it pronounced my last name, Maddaloni, perfectly! Some terms or words get a literal spelling, however overall the post is translated verbatim.
A nice feature they have added is HTML tagging to a post so that a certain block is not read. This is good if you have programming code in your post.
I would like to see them add metrics and other measurements to the service so I know who is listening.
mp/m
Posted by: Mike Maddaloni at August 29, 2007 09:02 AM