What’s happening here is that Talkr converts my text feed into a synthesized sound or a streaming audio channel, and this in turn is fed or imported into Odeo for regular blog feed podcast. Thanks to Chris Brooke’s clarification and Odeo’s support for getting this to work.

What this essentially means is that you can now ‘listen’ to my blog content as audio, instead of reading my blog either on the web or via feed. It’s like adding another dimension to my basic content. While, the voice is not mine (it is machine generated), it is still nice to close your eyes, sit back and enjoy listening. Yay!

Update: Oh! this is sounding like my dad’s old LP playing in an SP mode. Am I the only one hearing the mimicry?

Update 2: Odeo tells me that Talkr’s encoded frequency is not normal and so their flash based player won’t play nice.

The reason for this is the Flash player’s difficulty dealing with files encoded at a rate that is not a multiple of 11.025 kHz. The result is what we call the “chipmunk” effect. If this is your channel, avoid being chipmunked, encode all MP3’s at 11.025 22.05 or 44.1 kHz. If it is not, you can leave a message in the comments page of the channel. Note: when you download it, it will sound normal.

So, this is a hassle. My guess is you’re better off reading or listening from individual post links. I have a “play” or a “playback” link in the meta area of the post alongside the categories the post is filed in. Just click on play and you should be able to listen to the mp3 version of the post. Sorry for the googly.

I wish companies like Odeo could machine generate the audio from the feeds like Talkr does. If it did, I’d drop my feed reader any time for a machine generated podcast of my selection of blogs and blog posts. I’m all for ‘real voice’ podcasts, it’s just that it’s a bigger hassle than writing a post for most of us (not technically, but presentation wise, we don’t want to sound dull and tired, but rather chirpy and enthusiastic). And if you have a heavy day job, then you can just forget about it.

If Odeo, or any podcasting company, could take my blog feed and generate a podcast I can subscribe to and listen to like a feed-radio, then I’m ready to drop my feed reader today.

In the podcasting news, Yahoo! has announced a podcasting service. Tom Coates has an excellent review that I absolutely agree with.

How do I do this? Quite easy really. I created an account on Talkr, added my blog URI to it’s list. Then, I added this following code in my template:

<a href="http://www.talkr.com/app/fetch.app?feed_id=564
&perma_link=<?php the_permalink() ?>">Listen to this post</a>

The whole thing above should be in one single line. Notice that the URI points to Talkr that has my feed_id and the post permalink tag, so that Talkr knows which post it will be reading out loud.

I think it’s quite nice, except that the voice pronounces my name, Chétan sound totally wrong =)

Update (June 28): I received an email from Chris Brooks today. He said:

Thanks for the post on Talkr. Sorry that we’re not pronouncing your name correctly. Is the “Ch” in Chetan a soft “ch” (like in the word “cheese”) or a hard “k” sound? If you can send me a phonetic spelling, I’ll re-train our speech engine.

We ask that bloggers agree to our Terms of Service before they implement (it’s not a problem to implement first, however — I realize that the 2-day wait is annoying. We are going to eliminate that waiting period in the next week or two.)

Notice that I had enabled it without signing the terms of service (because I was asked to wait for 2-days as well), and yet, my feed was allowed to be played from Talkr’s servers. Generous guys, and they really care.

Update: Three words: Oh-my-god! This is tremendous. Fantastic audio quality for podcasts, there are some really good channels out there and, great interface. Wow! I’m totally hooked. Like totally!

Update 2: I subscribed to six channels today and listened to Woz, Tim Oreilly, Joel Spolsky and Nicole Simon’s “Cruel to be kind” reboot7 postcast. Wow!

My Odeo feed subscription is here.