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Saturday, July 10, 2010

BlogRadio is a text-to-speech RSS feed reader

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For some people and in some situations, using a regular RSS reader is not feasible. Sometimes you may want to, or have to, listen to your feeds, rather than read them.

BlogRadio is one possible free solution for such a use case. It's an AIR application, which purportedly uses a "natural voice". Excited, I downloaded it to marvel at what new text-to-speech technology they may have cooked up; I was disappointed to find extremely synthesized and mechanical voices, which are a far cry from the top of the line in current text-to-speech technology (pun definitely intended, and I hope it brightened up your day; I'm here all week). [I don't get it... -Ed]

What's good about the application is that it's free and cross-platform, and that it correctly parses RSS feeds (obviously, since this is all it does). So perhaps it is a better solution that using a generic screen reader with a regular feed reader, because it is context-aware and does not read any extraneous information off the blog, but just the content of the post you're currently reading.

It's not something I would use on a routine basis, but as I said, it may come in handy under certain circumstances. I just hope they do something about that text-to-speech engine ...

BlogRadio is a text-to-speech RSS feed reader originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 07 Jun 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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