Give Your Blog a Voice by Creating a Podiocast (11/19/2008 Reconstruct)
[This is a reconstructed version of the 11/19/2008 post which was deleted by server error.]
Have you noticed the new “listen now” icon that shows up under the blog titles? It’s compliments of a service called Odiogo, which does a surprisingly good job of generating audio content on the fly. Although the narrative is computer generated, the quality is fairly good.
Why Try Odiogo?
For me, I thought I’d give the free service a try for two reasons. First, I was looking for a solution to offer visitors who may be visually impaired without my having to do a lot of work. Odiogo definitely delivers! Second, I was interested in creating additional unique RSS feeds. Again, Odiogo delivers. You can take a look at the “podiocast” feed by clicking on the feed icon.
What You Get With Odiogo.
Odiogo is absolutely free for bloggers and has a paid option for news sites that are not based strictly on CMS platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, BlogEngine.NET and Terapad.
For the blog reader on the go, Odiogo’s audio output can be listened to on iPods, MP3 players and mobile phones, with a “streaming” output of several feeds or just one feed. Rather than calling the output a “podcast,” Odiogo describes its audio content as a “podiocast.” A podcast is usually created by a real live human, whereas the high fidelity, artificial intelligence “text to speech” product from Odiogo is called a “podiocast.”
The “podiocast” MP3 files are stored on Odiogo’s server, which means that your blogging server is not filled up.
For heavily trafficked blogs, you might receive some revenue from Odiogo’s advertisements. These small ads appear as audio messages right before your content.
Odiogo Is Easy to Install.
Perhaps the best feature offered by Odiogo is that it is so easy to install. You visit the site, type in your blog’s URL or feed URL and your email, and Odiogo generates a plugin on the fly. In the case of Wordpress, FTP the plugin into your wp-content/plugin file and activate it.
Once activated, the “listen now” icon shows up automatically under your titles and the audio content is created without any technical knowledge on your part. The feed icon is generated as a widget that you enable within your “design” section of the administrative portion of your blog.
Give Your Blog a Voice.
Odiogo is 100% free, so if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to generate audio content on your blog, check it out.
A Couple of Quick Tips.
Since we’re dealing with artificial intelligence and not a real live human recording, I noticed a couple of things that might help enhance the audio quality.
- Avoid placing captions in your images, or if you do, maybe note that they are captions. Be sure to put a period at the end of your caption.
- Put periods in your headers or subheadings. When there is no punctuation, Odiogo’s system reads all of the words as one sentence, so it will sound like a run-on sentence and not make sense.
- Configure your RSS feed so that it displays the entire article. Odiogo “transcribes” what appears in the feed, so if you only include the first couple of sentences or first 100 words, the audio will stop, leaving the listener with useless information.
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