Anyone interested in a News Reader?

**reefhippie** · 01-14-2005, 03:36 PM

I developed an RSS News Aggregator for the PC that is skinnable and could be converted into an in-car News Reader with a little work. Would anyone be interested in this? It would be free of course. Just don't want to spend a lot of time on it if nobody wants it.

**cadence117** · 01-14-2005, 03:58 PM

uhhh...

YES!!!!

possible a weather reader too if you could integrate that

what is the voice quality?

**reefhippie** · 01-14-2005, 04:18 PM

Weather, didn't even think of that. Here's the problem with weather. The NOAA has free real-time weather data available but it's in very archaic flat files on an FTP server, whereas other web service providers (accuweather, weatherroom, etc) that offer it in XML format charge for their services. Real-time sports scores and stock quotes are the same way, and they can get pretty expensive. The only way I'd be able to do this would be to develop the technology, but it would be up to the user to subscribe to these services directly from the service providers, unless they offered it free in exchange for advertising space, which I don't want to do. I'm not down with commercialism. This is also true for some, but not all RSS news feeds. I'm surprised nobody has done this yet.

The News Reader incorporates the Microsoft Text-To-Speech SDK, so that's as good as it gets. Of course, others have developed True Voice engines with better quality for the Microsoft SDK, but again, they would have to be purchased seperately.

**IntellaWorks** · 01-14-2005, 05:04 PM

I got a couple of things...

1. Can you list that government web site on that FTP server, that could be useful to someone in the future... say for instance... ME !

2. I've actually heard those true voice "servers" thier pretty crazy but you also need a pretty crazy server to run them (SQL server with @ least 512MB of ram )

**reefhippie** · 01-14-2005, 05:23 PM

http://weather.gov/tg/dataprod.html

I'm not sure about the TTS servers to which you are referring. Honestly, I've only used the Microsoft and Lernout & Hauspie TTS engines for testing but I could probably make the app SAPI4 or SAPI5 compliant so AT&T Natural Voices, NeoSpeech, & Cepstral engines could be used. To my knowledge, no additional hardware/software requirements are needed.