Speech Recognition/Synthesis and RSS News Readers

[ephramz]

Been exploring RSS readers this afternoon. Found some interesting stuff
NewsMac supports syncing news to Palm and iPod (text only) using the iSilo reader
http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/newsmac/features.html

NewsFan supports conversion of news feeds to voice using built in OS X voices, which could then be synced to an iPod
http://www.makienterprise.com/newsfan/index.html

Cepstral has a bunch of new, higher quality voices for the Mac, that work through the standard Mac speech synth interface
http://www.cepstral.com/cgi-bin/downloads

NewsTicker will read you the headlines using speech synth and let you interact via speech recognition to read a particular story, but then it just brings it up in the web browser. It doesn't speak you the entire story
http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/newsticker

Now, I just need to knit these all together into one piece (and add a little script to parse out the main text from a web page news item) and I'll have what I really want- an RSS feeder that is voice controlled, and syncs audio to my mp3 player of the selected news items and text to my palm. Why doesn't anyone make that?!! Or does someone and I just missed it?

That's what a news reader really should be: I wake up in the morning and say, "Computer, read me the headlines"
computer: "MacRumors headlines: Tiger released today. Read, Download or Skip?"
me: "download text to my PDA."
computer: "text download to PDA. Next headline: Bill Gates chokes on a pretzel after watching Steve Balmer dancing. Read, Download or Skip?"
me: "download audio to my iPod."
computer: filters out story from web page and synthesizes speech to MP3 file which is added to sync list."Audio downloaded to iPod. Next Story: Apple to hold press conference announcing iFlix movie download. Read, Download or Skip?"
me: "Read it to me."
computer: "Taking the stage with several movie industry big wigs today at Moscone Center, Steve Jobs announced..."

This should all be possible with current technology, no?

 

[broken_keyboard]

It would be good if you could walk around brushing your teeth and getting dressed etc. while having that conversation with the computer.

But since you would probably have to sit down beside it for the speech recog to work, you might as well read it off the screen. Much faster to scan a list of headlines with your eyes than go through that laborious conversation. It would be ok if you had a radio microphone headset.

 

[ephramz]

Well, yeah, I like to listen to the news when I'm cooking, getting ready to go out in the morning, so that I can get that "reading" out of the way then, and when I have time to sit in front of my computer I can do writing that I need to do.

And yes, it should be possible to do with a radio mic or large room mic, like a PZM. I know that the Mac speech recognition doesn't work with the Bluetooth headsets, but there are other wireless mics.