MIT Technology Review and AudioDizer have teamed up to bring text-to-speech podcasts for all of Technology Review’s articles, blogs, special reports and magazines.
Now you can get the latest technology news in MP3 format. Whether you listen to it on your computer or take it to go on your iPod/cell phone – best of all it’s all free!
To listen to an article, please go to TechnologyReview.com and click on any article. Un the “Audio†tab in the article’s toolbar select “Listen Now†or “Downloadâ€.
To subscribe to these podcasts so that they can be automatically downloaded to your computer or iPod, please click on the subscribe icon here.
Click to view Press Release.
AudioDizer, MIT, Podcasting, Technology Review, magazine, technology, text-to-speech
A huge acquisition has been finalized today in Microsoft buying Tellme. If you go to Tellme’s homepage they have a description that I thought was interesting:
Tellme brings you answers. The latest sports scores, the local Chinese restaurant, updated stock quotes, weather reports, driving directions and more.
Seems to me what they are trying to accomplish is to be able to call up their service, speak a question into it and get back information. A scenario seems like a user would call up and say “Seattle weather” and then the service would speak back the answer. Apparently there is a huge bet from Tellme and Microsoft that this will be a worthwhile service. It seems like this is kind of one step further than MovieFone and just voice enabled instead. I’m not saying that it will not be a great service, but it just seems kind of…limited.
I went to the beta products home page and it looks like what they are offering is similar to what Google has already in their SMS service. Except with voice.
What would be a great product would be where I can have an application that I could load up on my phone, talk into it and say “latest U.S. News” and get an option of stories which I can then listen to. My user scenario would go something like this: Someone mentions to me at work that there has been a hurricane which hit the east coast. I’m too busy at work to seek out the details but I do spend a lot of time commuting home from work, so during my commute I load up this application. I speak into it “Hurricanes on the east coast” and it responds “New York Times”, “USA Today”, “CNN”, and so on. From there I would say “New York Times” and then from there it would speak to me the article (using AudioDizer of course). Now that would be useful!
AudioDizer, text-to-speech
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal published on March 8 discussing the Dow Jones & Co’s Wall Street Journal’s decline in ad revenue.
The decline was due to a dropoff in revenue from technology, financial, general and classified advertising categories. Though dollar amounts weren’t provided - they were definitely hit across the board.
I wonder what happened to the rest of the industry. More reason to use AudioDizer!
AudioDizer, Wall Street Journal, newspaper
Patrick Purcell, Publisher of the Boston Herald, came to MIT Sloan last week to discuss the dynamics of the newspaper industry. Some of the interesting things that were discussed were:
- Today, on average, traditional newspapers lose between 1 percent and 3 percent in circulation each year.
- Consumers forced the Herald from having a subscription online service to a freely available service in the 90s.
These are some of the reasons why we created AudioDizer. We want people to be able to get the content in the format they prefer.
You can find the full story of the Pat Purcell visit on the New@Sloan March 5th edition.
AudioDizer, Pat Purcell, newspaper
If you are not familiar with what Products and Services AudioDizer provides, head over to the Products page. Right now on the internet there are tons of Web 2.0 sites that provide users the ability to add thier own content and edit it such as flickr, youtube, and many others. What is not yet available on the internet is a way for companies to present their web content through all the new digital products with rich content. That’s where AudioDizer comes in. We are constantly coming up with new ways for websites to present their media and engage users. Our newest product will be available at: VideoDizer soon. Thanks for stopping by!
AudioDizer
In this blog we will be writing about digital media trends, sharing thoughts on text-to-speech, posting media events, and press releases about AudioDizer and Podcasting. Please feel free to contribute to our discussion.
Thanks,
The AudioDizer Team
AudioDizer, Blogroll, Podcasting, text-to-speech