Talkr: Podcasting for the Shy

Every so often, friends send me links to Web 2.0 sites. Sometimes it's because they think I'll find them interesting, and sometimes it's because they just can't wait to hear me rant on how useless something is. I'm not sure what the intended reaction was supposed to be for Talkr, but while it's not something I'd use myself, I can see how it could be useful.

Talkr is a service that allows you to podcast your blog… without a microphone. Instead, it takes your site's regular RSS or Atom feed and converts it to a spoken-word format using one of those nifty little text-to-voice converters. (We have a new Profy feed if you'd like to listen to Profy on your MP3 player.)

The text-to-voice translation is excellent, with few mistakes in pronunciation. It also does a good job with punctuation, getting fairly close to a human speaker's intonation. However, at least at the moment, there is no way to handle multiple author blogs, so everything ends up in one gender voice. It also doesn't make mistakes and hesitations like a human speaker does. To compare Talkr vs. a live podcast, you can hear Talkr's version of my human rights post, and then try hearing my actual voice reading the article.

Talkr (at least for now) is free to use, and can also be used with ad feeds for an additional revenue stream for your blog. If you are shy or don't want to spend the day-and-a-half I did figuring out exactly HOW to record, convert, and then upload your podcast (I may be geeky, but apparently creatively geeky isn't quite the same thing), Talkr is a very easy way to provide yet another way for your blog readers to access your posts.