Odiogo Converts Any News Feed Into MP3 Audio

"The radio has long provided people on the go with the latest news, but never before have listeners been able to create their own “radio shows” by mixing and matching contents from their favorite newspapers, magazines and blogs," said Patrice Khawam, founder and CEO of Odiogo. "With Odiogo, people can easily and conveniently build their own podcasts to include, for example, the business pages from The Wall Street Journal, international news from the BBC, or music reviews from Rolling Stone, and listen to the content on an MP3 player while they’re at the gym, in the car, or on the subway."

Odiogo Customizes Podcasts of News Content

Many articles and blog posts available on the Web today can be read through third-party websites such as Google and Yahoo! thanks to the standard distribution format, RSS. Odiogo converts the content on any website containing RSS feeds into small audio files using cutting-edge text-to-speech technology. Unlike many of its predecessors, this new breed of artificial intelligence technology observes punctuation and more natural speech patterns to provide a better quality listening experience.

Odiogo comes with 200 preinstalled news feeds including The New York Times, CNN, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, BBC, and Rolling Stone. Users can also easily add feeds beyond Odiogo’s list; any website that provides an RSS feed can be podcasted via Odiogo. Every page of text converts, on average, into a 2 MB audio file, allowing approximately 256 articles to be stored on a 512 MB MP3 player.

Odiogo requires a PC running Windows XP or 2000 with at least 128 MB memory and 5 GB hard drive space. Having installed the software, users simply select their desired news feeds (e.g. San Francisco Chronicle Business section; BBC Health section etc) using the “Feeds” button, click “Refresh” to start downloading the latest articles from the selected feeds and convert them into MP3 files, and, lastly, drag and drop the MP3 files produced by Odiogo into Apple iTunes or any other MP3 program.

"People typically use digital audio devices to listen to music," said Khawam. "Odiogo brings a new dimension to MP3 player use."

Source: Odiogo