Create a Podcast Without Any Added Hassle

My bosses are absolutely crazy about the work of the internet marketing guru Derek Gehl, so naturally I read his feeds. A recent post on his blog highlighted a blogging tool that was just too interesting to resist, so I decided to give it a try. Called Feed 2 Podcast, it reads an RSS feed and turns it into a podcast using a text-to-speech synthesizer.

You can hear it in action here. It works as well as you can expect a TTS synthesizer to work. The inflections are occasionally wrong, but that doesn’t cause much loss of comprehension. The bigger problem, especially with casual-language blogs, is how it chooses to spell out contractions rather than pronouncing them. It works well enough sometimes, but chokes on text that features frequent contractions or atypical sentence structure.

The real benefit, of course, is that there’s no added work; you can have your own podcast without any the hassle of dealing with audio equipment and software. It’s worth a try if you’re interested in giving your readers another way to partake of your blog. If your writing is more natural than formal, though, it might be more frustrating than liberating for your users. It’s very easy to set up the feed, so be sure to test it for yourself before making it a feature on your blog.