Well so far only one other person has subscribed to my two audiofeed versions (which is fine, ’cause this really isn’t a podcast), but I just thought I’d give you my impressions. I continue to be impressed with how well both Talkr and Feed2Podcast translate text to voice – very rarely to they really screw up a word. I’ve noticed that Feed2Podcast doesn’t provide any meaningful ID3 tags on the mp3 that it creates, which means if you’re browsing through your playlist you will have no idea what it is you’re about to listen to. Talkr includes the name of the blog, so you have a good idea. The other day I enabled Feedburner’s FeedFlare service on this feed, which inserts a few small images at the bottom of each post in the RSS feed (email this, add to delicious, etc). When Talkr gets to this string of images it repeats "the original post had an image here, the original post had an image here" four times, which is kind of annoying, but I guess it’s better to let you know that there’s some content that’s missing from the audio version. So overall I’m still impressed.
Comments
3 Responses to “Updates on Talkr and Feed2Podcast”
Good morning, and thank you for trying Talkr.
You mentioned that the repetition of “The original post included an image at this point” was annoying. I agree that our current way of indicating an image is less than ideal – I´d be very interested in any ideas you have for improving that. We have considered a few different options:
1. Simply allowing the blogger to specify whether they want this sort of detail included;
2. Playing a sound when you encounter an image (so that you would simply hear ¨ding¨ instead of any words);
3. Switching to a different voice (or possibly to a softer voice) to announce the image;
Any other suggestions for how to improve that feature? Personally, I´m leaning towards option #3 – not least because we need to do something similar when you encouter a link.
I would be very interested in your thoughts.
Thanks,
Chris
Thanks Chris, I had actually considered dropping a suggestion to you on this, so thanks for popping in first! #2 is right out, IMHO – just wouldn’t make sense to the uninitiated. I think I agree that #3 is the way to go, but could you also reduce the length so maybe it just said, quietly, “image here” or something like that? I guess you could also leave #1 as an option, as long as you explained to folks that they’d be screening out some of their content with no warning to the listener. The only place in *my* blog where this is an issue is with the new FeedFlare service from Feedburner, which inserts those images at the end of the post in the RSS feed. Would it be possible to program Talkr to just ignore any images from FeedFlare?
Thanks again, hope Costa Rica is treating you well (we’re above zero here today at least!)
Hi Paul,
I am Max, developer from feed2podcast.com. Thank you for suggesting a feature for our engine. We are still a BETA version and working everyday to make it better. Your suggestion of ID3 tags is added to list and we will soon process it. Do you have anything more to suggest us ?
Thank you
Max
Feed2podcast.com