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25th October 2006

Talking blogs

posted in blogs, digitalstorytelling |

Wow. I love the opportunities we have today, thanks to web 2.0, to learn from each other. I saw this evening some links on Will Richardson’s blog posts that said, “Listen to this podcast.” Curious, I clicked on one and was pleased to hear a reasonably human sounding computer-voice read the text of the blog post to me. I backtracked the mp3 file’s link to the domain and found Talkr: Letting blogs speak for themselves. After signing up, I read the Embed Audio Links page on the site and found the free Talkr Podcast Plugin for Wordpress.

After a quick ftp file upload of the plugin, an activation click and entering my free Talker feed ID: Whoa-la! You can listen to this and every new post on my blog as a dynamic text-to-speech audio file. Older posts that were not in my RSS feed when I set this up may not play, unfortunately, but all the new posts and most recent ones should.

This is a free tool and I’m thrilled with it now, but I am wondering… Is there a way to change this to a male voice?!

A podcast feed of these audio files is also available, but for some reason it doesn’t appear to include the latest 15 posts. Not sure what is going on with that, I’ll have to troubleshoot this more later. Talkr is a great idea and a super resource!

On this day..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 11:45 pm and is filed under blogs, digitalstorytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 2 responses to “Talking blogs”

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  1. 1 On October 26th, 2006, David Stone said:

    My first question that came to mind about Talkr was…How digitized will the text to speech sound? It really isn’t too bad, however “she” doesn’t seem to have quite the exhilaration you have. Wes you now have a new persona!
    Also, any idea where the Web 2.0 spelling came about with dropping the last E before R ? ie. Flickr, Zoomr, Uploadr, Talkr, etc.

  2. 2 On October 26th, 2006, Wesley Fryer said:

    Maybe we can talk the people at Talkr into using a voice that gets more enthusiastic from time to time! :-) Thanks David, you are kind.

    I am not sure, but I would guess that domain names like “flicker” and “zoomer” were already taken, so people figured out they could use just “r” instead of “er” and still have a catchy domain name that was available for registration. That’s just a guess tho!