My Blog Now Has a Voice ! « planetOzh

I'm currently giving a new plugin a try: Odiogo's Listen Button converts your posts to an audio file, ready to be downloaded, podcasted, or just played from within the page while you're reading it.

A few years ago I had tried something similar, but it sort of sucked: you needed to register first in order to play audio files. Hopefuly Odiogo gets it right and anybody can listen to your blogging.

The plugin itself is as simple as it can be. Follow these instructions to get their activate-and-forget plugin (it may currently take a few hours before you receive the needed activation email, but they're working to improve this), and you're reading to podcast yourself away. Their system seems to support many languages, and the English text-to-speech generation at least looks pretty decent to me.

I'm not a podcast fan (and I must say I find it usually pretty boring) but at the moment I find this plugin on my own blog quite amusing and, why not, useful.

• It's fun to hear what you've just typed
• For me not being an English native speaker, it's always good to practice a bit :Þ
• I'm pretty sure it can actually improve one's writing style: weird sentences cannot be missed when heard, and it's easier to detect unwanted typos or repetitions repetitions (hey, this one was intended of course)

We'll see how I will be using or not this plugin in the long run. I guess my next post with code snippets should be particularly lame in an audio file, for instance (hey Odiogo team, suggestion ! Support something like <!–no-odiogo–>some text<!–/no-odiogo–> to manually exclude some parts from the generated speech)

What do you think ? Like it ? Hate it ? Don't give a sh1t ? (yes, I'm testing their leetspeak abilities too). Anyway, expect this plugin to pop in a number of WordPress blogs. I'm predicting it a fair success! What you say? Excuse, I cannot hear you over the sound of how hip I am…