A blog mashup: adding text-to-speech

There is a link reading "Listen to this article" followed by a small image (

) at the bottom of each post on our class blog. If you roll the mouse over the link text, you will see a link to Talkr.com in the status area of the browser, for example: http://www.talkr.com/app/fetch.app?feed_id=25222&perma_link=http://cis471.blogspot.com/2007/09/challenges-to-microsoft-office.html

Clicking on that link takes you to Talkr.com, a text-to-speech service. A program at Talkr.com reads the post, converts it to an audio (.mp3) file, and sends it back to the client to be played by a media player. Try it out before reading further.

A few years ago, it would have taken a great deal of time and expertise to add text-to-speech capability to my blog. Today, I was able to do it in minutes, by adding a single line of HTML code to my blog template:

<a expr:href='"http://www.talkr.com/app/fetch.app?feed_id=25222&perma_link=" + data:post.url' target='_blank' title='Listen'>Listen to this article<img src='http://images.talkr.com/images/speaker_20.gif' style='border:none;'/></a> Note that this is not the call to Talkr.com listed above -- it is the line of HTML that generated the call.

By adding that line of code, I created a mashup between the blog and Talkr.com. I was able to do so easily because Talkr.com has opened their site and published their application programming interface (API). In other words, they allow people to incorporate the Talkr service into their own Web sites, and give them the instructions on how to do it.

One might wonder about Talkr.com and their business model. How can they profit from offering this service? You can read more about Talkr.com here.

This note shows how to modify a Blogger blog template to add text-to-speech using the Talkr.com service.

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