The Talking Blog

My kids watch a car­toon on PBS about a talk­ing dog named Martha.  It turns out the dog ate some alpha­bet soup and through the magic of tele­vi­sion, learned how to speak Eng­lish.  How­ever, to the dis­may of my chil­dren, this post is about talk­ing blogs — not dogs.

Thanks to Buz­zVoice, my blog can talk.  (Sadly, it is cursed to repeat my words, as opposed to being able to speak for itself.  Maybe one day arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can replace me.)   Buz­zVoice enables auto­mated text to speech edit­ing for blogs.   I man­aged to fina­gle an invite from my friend John Atkin­son to try the beta ver­sion of Buz­zVoice for pub­lish­ers.  I have now installed the Buz­zVoice wid­get in the side­bar of my blog, enabling you to lis­ten to my posts as read to you by the same com­puter voice from another favorite site — xtranormal.com

The text to speech recog­ni­tion is actu­ally quite good.  Buz­zVoice does a very nice job of con­vert­ing my ram­blings to audio, and it costs me noth­ing.  What is really cool is that the Buz­zVoice wid­get makes the con­tent on my site avail­able as a pod­cast, which vis­i­tors can down­load and lis­ten to at their convenience.

As a cre­ator of con­tent, Buz­zVoice is a great tool with the poten­tial to deliver my con­tent to new peo­ple in new ways — with very lit­tle effort.  As a con­sumer of con­tent it pro­vides with a con­ve­nient option for get­ting infor­ma­tion.  If you find your­self with more unread con­tent than time, their iphone app is well worth $1.99.  My thanks to the Buz­zVoice team for mak­ing my blog talk.  Now I am tasked with con­tin­u­ing to make sure it has some­thing to say.

Check out Buz­zVoice and ask them about get­ting wid­get for your site.  Thanks for read­ing and poten­tially lis­ten­ing to mine.

What do you think of Buz­zVoice?  Do you mind the com­puter voice?  Will you lis­ten to blogs?  Would you want oth­ers to lis­ten to your site?