Podcomplex Posts Now Podcasts

Podcomplex was originally intended to be a podcasting hub, but has evolved in another direction – the site now provides access to free mp3 downloads from thousands of independent artists. However, new technology from Odiogo means that every post on this blog can now be downloaded or streamed as a podcast.

The TTS (text to speech) technology employed by Odiogo is surprisingly listenable and versatile, although clearly recognisable as speech synthesis. It competently deals with abbreviations and numbers, and if a word is misspelled, it will even pronounce the misspelling (although the author would probably prefer if it didn’t). This is how Odiogo expain the process:

TTS engines generally work in three steps: normalization, phonetization and speech synthesis. In the normalization phase, special expressions like abbreviations, email addresses or URLs are written out in full. In the phonetization phase, the correct phonetic transcription of a word is then looked up from a pronunciation dictionary.

To subscribe to the audio-enabled PodFeed, click on the Odiogo button . For more info on the Odiogo service, check out their FAQ.