Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Talkr.com-- creates a podcast from blog posts!

Do you see the little podcast icon at the bottom of every blog post? (It looks like this )

Clicking the link next to it will automatically create and then play a recording of a female voice reading the words in the post.

Thanks (again) to Vicki A. Davis and her Cool Cat Teacher Blog, I learned about Talkr.com, the free website that makes this possible. Vicki has a great Talkr "how-to" article posted on her blog here.

Even more amazing, is that Talkr will generate a "feed" that will enable users to download each audio blog post to their iPod!

The computer generated voice is no replacement for a real live human, but it's not bad! The text-to-speech synthesis has improved tremendously in the past few years. (Check out this demo at the AT&T Labs)

I'll be spending more time at the Talkr website to see what else I can learn about this cool new resource.

1 comment:

Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher said...

Thanks for the plug! I've been enjoying talkr. It went down this past weekend for a little while! I think they are having trouble keeping up with the demand. It is really a phenomenal service!