New Services Translate News Feeds into Podcasts

Two new services, Talkr and Speakwire, promise to take RSS news feeds from blogs and other sources, and convert them into audio podcasts. The services provide a new option for creating podcast content and generating audio versions of web content.

Talkr provides a service that allows users to listen to their favorite text-only news sources rather than read them. It converts RSS feeds from text to speech and can also provide a podcast of news sources. Talkr has partnered with several of the most widely read blogs on the Internet to provide an audio version of those blogs for free. To use Talkr to listen to other blogs, monthly and annual subscriptions are available.

Speakwire gathers news feeds from the prominent news organizations around the world and delivers it to computers as an audio summary of events from news, politics, business, sport, fashion, etc.

According to Speakwire’s Gordon Renton, “As more people get to hear the results of speech technology, we are beginning to find the barriers breaking down to this method of delivery. Most people associate computer speech with visually impaired users. I think that is missing the point and we set out to demonstrate just how universal speech is. It’s the nearest equivalent to a common currency and can be exchanged and understood as easily. Speech is mightier than the pen.”

Speakwire takes the latest news feeds around the world and converts them to audio, using PanaVox Speak Perfect Speech Technology. Speakwire’s Autocasting is an automated form of podcasting that allows bloggers and blog readers to generate audio versions of text blogs from RSS feeds. Autocasting software uses XML parsers, TTS (text-to-speech) engines, and audio conversion utilities to convert text blogs into audio files that can be placed on a blog for download, synchronized to a portable audio device, or played on a desktop computer.

Source: Podcasting News