Windows Phone Thoughts: Automatic Speechcasting: Have Your Favorite Blogs As PodCasts

"Automatic ‘SpeechCasting’ (...) is combining TTS (TextToSpeech) software with an RSS reader to automatically pull down your favorite regular text feeds and convert them to spoken audio mp3s. And wouldn’t you know it, such software already exists, its called ‘NewsAloud’ and its from Nextup the makers of TextAloud. NewsAloud lets you subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds as well as news streams from Reuters and Yahoo. You can set the refresh frequency like most readers, once the posts are downloaded you can read them or push a button and convert them to speech and save them as MP3 files. The most powerful feature in my opinion is a mode that automatically converts new articles to mp3s and drops them in a folder of your choosing. You can control the max number of files allowed in this folder and NewsAloud will overwrite the oldest ones with newer ones when this number is reached. This way at any given moment in time you have your latest feeds and news sitting in a folder ready to sync to your device!"

This seems like an ideal solution for those people who like blogs (and who doesn't these days?), and who would like their personal assistant to read them to them. No need for a living personal assistant to do this, just turn to your personal digital assistant, and have your blogs read out loud to you in voices that according to John sound "actually quite nice, a bit monotone but clearly intelligible". You can get a free trial version of NewsAloud, or order it for $19.95, at NextUp.com.