Audio bits and bobs.

EveryZing – attempts to analyse the audio in online audio and video to enable searching (Technical details are outlined in SpeechTechMag). I’ve just tried searching “News” for “Peter Tobin” – who has cropped up a lot in the UK news in the past few days. I didn’t get any hits, though when I extended this to “All sources” I got several YouTube videos (including several from UK based news agencies). I guess that it’s predominantly the North American (US?) news channels that it searches. Blinkx gave me quite a few more hits.
I’ve been using Talkr for a while now, to create audio podcasts of my blog posting. From Scott’s blog, I discovered xFruits, which he’s using to create a pdf of his rss feed. I’ve just managed to do the same, though it took some time, as I wasn’t sure which RSS feed it wanted -and it seemed to be quite fussy (the atom one satisfied it) xFruits have a range of services, including an audio generating one. After quite a few false starts, I’ve managed to create one, and after a while I’ve discovered how I think that I can listen to it. As far as I can tell, I have to go to VocalFruits – and sign in. The voice is better than the talkr one, the drawback – probably related to the quality of the voice, is the fact that I can only have 100 free listens. I’ve used up a few already testing it. If I want to use it more, I have to pay €35 a month (for up to 1,000 listens). Guess I’ll stick with Talkr! (The .pdf creation would appear to be free).