Apple iPod text to speech

September 23, 2006

This has probably been beaten to death in macrumor sites already - I’m not speculating as to what might or might not be coming out in future versions.  I *did* have the idea (however unoriginal) that including ‘text to speech’ in the iPod would make it tremendously useful for reading blog RSS feeds.  Imagine being able to simply download juts a couple meg of blog feeds and being able to have hours and hours of audible text.  It would really revolutionize the portable audio market again.  Given that Microsoft has had decent text to speech for awhile in their Windows CE product, I’m not sure why spoken blogs have not been a more widely marketed angle from them.  Perhaps it’s not really as good in practice as it is in my head. 

I got to thinking about this reading about the upcoming release of the Zune player from Microsoft.  Although the ‘wireless’ aspect may be neat for playing around with sharing a few songs, it seems they’re going to put too many restrictions on it which would prevent large or even medium scale sharing.  Additionally the songs you share with others will apparently timeout/delete after X days.  While that’s not *bad*, it’s not something which would make me rush out and buy one.   Creating audio access to the massive supply of RSS blog posts out there would be, imo, revolutionary.  It would certainly attract the blind market as well, especially if the player had an audio-friendly menu system (reading out the menu links when hovered over).

Posted in Apple, Ideas, Microsoft, Web