We used to use a feature from FeedBlitz from a company called Talkr. Talkr allowed our users a way to listen to our blog via a high quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) Engine that created MP3 files. We are not sure how many users were using this service, but we thought it was something helpful for those on the go and the seeing impaired. Unfortunately, when doing a spring cleaning we noticed that Talkr may have gone offline. We are not sure if they are gone as there is no message of the sort on their official blog, but their main site is down (and has been awhile). We decided to replace Talkr because of this, and because we found there was not much activity around their product. We are proud to announce that today we have enabled our blog over at Odiogo. Odiogo (like Talkr) is a great Free TTS service offering a high quality product. One of the benefits of using Odiogo (as opposed to Talkr) is the ease to which people can subscribe to podcasts.  Odiogo also offers plug-ins for major blogging platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger, etc). We decided not to enable this feature, but if there is demand we might. Odigo also provides blog owners with detailed download statistics. For all the benefits of Odiogo, we must point out the downside of using TTS instead in creating our own Podcast. Please note, this is not Odiogo’s issue as it applies to all forms of Text-To-Speech engines.  The audio files cannot have the richness of pronunciation or inflection that an engaged reader might add when a post is recorded directly from speech. As well, passages with sample code do not record well in the TTS  world.  Nevertheless, we are excited to be using Odiogo and their quality product. We hope you take a moment to try it out and share your feedback.

Listen to  Mark8t Blog via Odiogo
Subscribe to Mark8t Podcast via your favourite podcast client