Talkr reads blogs for you

Talkr (their tagline is “Letting blogs speak for themselves”) is a site that lets you listen to popular blogs being read to you. The catch is that it’s not a person reading, but a computer. If your idea of computer-generated voice is the Speak & Spell toy from the 1980s, you can be forgiven for thinking Talkr is a terrible idea. But the speech synthesis here is surprisingly good. Listen to some of the free blogs they have on this page (they have dozens more that you have to pay to listen to). I enjoy reading the Many2Many blog, and the audio version is remarkably uncrappy. It’s not good enough yet for me to make it part of my information diet, but clearly they’re improving fast. Text-to-speech synthesis is a big deal; I’m sure it will start to show up all over the place now that it’s acceptably good.