SpeakWire.com, another RSS-to-speech converter
In addition to Talkr.com, which can convert text-only blogs to speech, another option, noted by Gary Price in SearchEngineWatch.com note and Jenny Levine on her blog, is SpeakWire.com, which converts individual RSS feeds to speech.
SpeakWire also provides this convenient definition of the differences between podcasting and autocasting:
” ‘Podcasting’ is making audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user’s convenience. ‘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: Jenny Levine, “Speaking About Blogs ….”, The Shifted Librarian, 02005 06 09
Central Washington University librarian Anna L. Creech also pointed to the open source software AutoCast on a WEB4LIB post (02005 06 14). The AutoCast site also points to another product called FeedSpeaker that also converts RSS feeds to spoken text in the MP3 format. The Wikipedia entry on autocasting referenced by the AutoCast site also points to a commercial software application called MyNewsToGo, another RSS-to-speech converter.
Hi, I see a similiar one service yesterday in italy, it’s called http://www.dixero.com