Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Not-a-Robot Brit Reads Newspaper for You She reads the world's news with a British accent, and although she sounded a bit robotic at first, I'm going to give her a try a little longer. No, I'm not talking about Joanne Colan; Rocketboom.com isn't the only online news source to pick up a British accent recently. The International Herald Tribune now offers free audio versions and customized podcasts of its news stories... read by a synthesized female voice at http://audio.iht.com The new service is "powered by ReadSpeaker," a voice-synthesis company in Sweden whose products "speak" the contents of Web pages.  The articles aren't exactly read by a robot. According to the company, "Articles are read by the latest text-to-speech technologies using professional readers whose recordings are converted into language dictionaries." Improvements in the voice quality are promised; the company is beta testing the service. (Perhaps the "free" aspect will change eventually, too.)   ReadSpeaker says the IHT service is the first customizable news podcast of its kind. Maybe it's just the daily newscast Dave Winer has been asking for. Of course there are other daily news podcasts, including local ones at WUOT and KnoxNews. In fact, KnoxNews is even podcasting all of the News Sentinel Editorial Board's interviews with more than 30 candidates in  upcoming August and November elections! Back to Paris... from the IHT press release: Visitors to IHT.com can now go to audionews.iht.com and select stories they would like to hear on the spot, or download articles to create a personalized audio feed that can be easily imported into iTunes or other podcasting software. IHT.com is the first English language Web site to launch a service of this kind -- audio for the articles are dynamically generated using voices from professional readers. Since the IHT was once the Paris Herald Tribune, I wonder if they could manage English with a French accent? A friend who spends the summers in Paris (poor guy) might suggest that the robot have one of the more snobbish New York accents -- he's convinced the paper isn't as good since it became a wholly-owned New York Times Co. publication. (History: When the New York Herald Tribune closed, the Washington Post and the Times joined forces to keep the international paper going. But the Times ended that collaboration a few years ago.) Speaking of history, I wonder if another old familiar voice could be enlisted in a podcast news service? 11:37:27 AM

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