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10 June 2005

Hear what I say, but definitely not what I sound like!

Posted by Richard Wallis at June 10, 2005 09:32 AM

The ever observant ShiftedLibrarian, in her Speaking about blogs.... posting, drew my attention to the wizzo new service provided by Talkr.com (www.talkr.com).

Point Talkr at your [or anyone else's] blog's RSS feed wait a few moments, and you end up looking at your postings in their interface, each with an associated mp3 file containing the posting as a mini-podcast.

The quality of translation from text to audio is very impressive, this technology has really matured.

So now all I need to do is capture all the blogs I monitor using Talkr and iPodder or something similar and I can be even more productive at 70mph on the way home each evening. To make it totally complete, can someone put together a dictation based trackback capture device and life would be perfect [except possibly for the people driving in the opposite direction to me on my way home - honestly officer, I was just answering an interesting point that Jon Udell raised when that tree stepped out in front of me]

The slightly disconcerting thing about all this is the amorphous North American female voice that speaks the blog postings to you. Here is an example from a previous post of mine [mp3]

Anyone who knows me will tell you I sound nothing like that! - No Birmingham accent for a start.

Update:
Here is the mp3 of this posting.

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Comments

Thank you for your post about Talkr. We would be happy to host a podcast of your blog, by the way. This would mean that your readers wouldn't have to visit Talkr at all to download your podcast -- they could simply point iPodder to a new RSS feed that Talkr would provide, and let iPodder put each new audio file directly on their mp3 player.

In addition, I see that you have linked to audio from a couple of your previous posts -- we can give you a script that will include audio links for every new post automatically.

If you're interested you can email me directly (cbrooks at talkr dot com) or submit your name at http://www.talkr.com/app/partners_inquiry.app.

Dictation-based trackback though.... Not sure if we can help with that. ;-)

Thanks!
-Chris

Posted by: Chris Brooks at June 10, 2005 08:40 PM