Text can get boring(exclusive for me), online, offline, anywhere you see, the main form of information representation is via text. While it’s one of those things that cannot be replaced and never runs out of style it can be hard to read an entire article without losing focus sometimes. Well, this issue has been addressed, which is why you tend to see some people shift towards a more media oriented approach when providing information.
However, if you are the newbie (or not) blogger looking to embrace other methods of presenting your information to your readers it’s not something you could do just like that (as you did when starting your blog), you could create podcasts by yourself that cover your content, but then again you maybe shy, or you may not have the hardware/software you need to get you started, in any case, thanks to iSpeech you can now automate the entire process and have a podcast of your blog’s post instantly.
For the most part, iSpeech is pretty much a text to speech service, but I didn’t build the whole suspense in the first two paragraphs if it was your average text to speech service, the ‘computer’ voice actually sounds quite natural, maybe even as good asbetter than KITT in the latest Knight Rider (too bad it was a flop). iSpeech provides a free WordPress plugin that lets you instantly convert your blog posts into a podcast which can then be directly listened to on your blog via their compact yet sufficient widget (provides all the standard functions of a media player).
You can listen to this post converted by iSpeech by hitting ‘listen’ above. The service is relatively new as there were quite a few glitches that needed to be ironed out initially, however I contacted them and they had the issues fixed in a day or two so integrating iSpeech into your blog should be seamless as you shouldn’t have these issues.
There’s a catch though, the ‘premium’ voice (as available on Computer Realm) is only available to blogs with a Google Page Rank higher than 1 and an Alexa less than 100k or you’d be left with the generic highly ‘computer like’ voices you probably have heard before in other text-to-speech software.
They’ve also tossed in a few paid services, which is pretty much the use of their API, available in different packages, the main purpose of which could be to remove the ‘brought to you by ispeech.org’ self promotion at the beginning of the audio, doesn’t really bother me though so I guess the free version would do.
One of the issues with the WordPress plugin is probably the converted audio limited to the number of posts you have set your feeds to display in your WordPress settings. While this setting is sufficient for the purpose of podcasting, the ‘listen’ widget on your blog is pretty much futile with older posts displaying an ‘audio not found’ which doesn’t really reflect well on your site readers.
Apart from that, I’ve not much to complain about, these kind of features are still pretty much untapped in the blogging world, implementing them while they are still new could give you the edge with your blog so I guess it would be a good idea to test drive iSpeech on your blog. Another similar service worth mentioning would be Odiogo, and as always don’t forget to leave your feedback and suggest similar services in the comments below.
