Listen to your RSS feeds with Blogbard
Blogbard is a new web application which lets you listen to your feeds. Currently you can hear feeds from Google reader and Bloglines. Probably in the future they’ll add more feed readers. The interface is decent for a product in beta, but not very intuitive or easy to navigate with keyboard arrows. Their text to voice converter is pretty good and it gets most pronunciations, including Indian ones right. But of course a mechanical voice with zero personality, is not the most pleasing thing to hear and I got bored really quickly. You can listen to the Webyantra feed, here.
As for the product itself I don’t see a large population of people on desktops using it. Anybody using feed readers with a lot of feeds, skims through them and on blogbard skimming is obviously slower. Absence of any keyboard shortcuts makes quick navigation even tougher. An useful feature will be letting the user create custom playlists by bookmarking some of the articles for future playing.
What I do think is a great market for the product are the people on iPhones, iPod touches and Blackberries. I checked out the site on iPod touch and the interface is really good. I believe in the future, once iPhone and iPod touch’s SDK is launched downloading of audio articles etc. For a mobile internet device it’s a really cool way to browse through one’s feeds. If there could be a way to make playlists for future playbacks on the mobile device, Blogbard could be more useful.
Right now, it doesn’t impress or has much utility. I doubt anybody would use it for more purposes than novelty.
By: Abhishek Nayak
Abhilash Ravishankar on Mar 8, 2008
They should concentrate on the mobile market. It doesn’t make sense to hear the ‘river-of-news’ on GoogReader, but it’s great if you have a tag on GReader of the feeds that you REALLY need to read every day, and you have a 1-hr drive to work.
Abhilash Ravishankar on Mar 8, 2008
On a different note, has there been any efforts (anywhere in the world) to improve the delivery of such automated audio, by tweaking the monotonous, mechanical voice to be more animated?
Deane on Mar 9, 2008
People cannot listen to TEXT / word audio feeds AND browse at the same time. We cannot multi-task in this manner. Listeinign to music while you surf is *much* different than this.
OperaFan on Mar 12, 2008
Or you can use the Opera web browser, and use its Voice feature to have your RSS feed read out. You can ofcourse also have your webpages, e-mails etc. read out too.
Not to mention that you can control your browser with your voice as well. Now that’s awesome!