Convert an RSS Feed to a Podcast with Odiogo

By Josh | April 25, 2008

If you are looking for a free way to convert text to speech for your blog, then take a look at Odiogo. It scans your RSS feed for text and creates audio files for your visitors to listen to. The audio files are also available for download to put on a mobile device. This would be great for blogs with very long posts. I signed up for an account, and it is going to take a few hours for it to scan my feed and set up the audio.

There is a demo on their website where you can get a taste of what the text to speech conversion is like. It’s not bad for being free. Although, it isn’t perfect. They also show a sample feed. For each feed there is an HTML, an XHTML, and an XML/RSS page created. The HTML page has links to popular RSS readers and podcast clients, and it also has a way to listen to or download the file. The XHTML page is basically for mobile listeners. The XML/RSS page is for subscribing in a normal RSS reader or in a program like iTunes. I tried subscribing to their sample RSS feed in FeedDemon, but when I downloaded and listened to the podcast it only read the title and not the whole article. However, if I opened the files from Firefox then they seemed to work fine.

Odiogo is definitely a nice service for bloggers looking for free text-to-speech conversion for their RSS feed. If I like it enough, then I might put a link to my podcast once it gets converted.

Update: As I was writing this post, I was emailed with the confirmation that my RSS had been converted to speech. There is a button in my sidebar.

Via Go2Web20.