Recently, it has come to our attention here at Geek Troika that people enjoy having things read to them. Why exactly? Is there some root in childhood memories of your parents (or grandparents, or any sort of beloved adult figure in your life) reading bedtime stories to you, or the story time circles from kindergarten? Bah, look at me, I’ve started describing things from the second person position, that’s never good. The point here is that people absorb information in a wide variety of methods. Some pass by fine with text on paper or screen. Others make due with pictures and video. To date, audio has been sort of an outmoded medium of conveying current events and news, especially with regards to highly segmented interests which the Internet has become especially famous for catering to, via news feeds and other methods.
Obviously, it’s impossible to expect a monthly, daily, hourly audio summary of current events, especially with the manner the news cycle has evolved to with updates and reports coming in virtually every second. A few possible audio solutions have come to the attention of us here at Geek Troika, and we thought that a brief introduction to two of these methods would be an insight to where we might be headed with how we consume our news. The main differentiator of these two services from other types of news aggregation methods is that both utilize computer generated audio to read information to you, some more commonly used to say funny phrases like “U R HOT” or any number of cuss words back when computers could first do that sort of thing. Or, at least, I did.
The first service for review purposes which I investigated was PimpMyNews, which takes various news feeds and blogs of your specification, bundles them together, and has a synthesized voice read it to you in a daily podcast. This recommendation came to us by the way of Geek Troika listener Phillip (aka @infoliberation), a user of the service. So, going by his info (har har, I made a pun) I proceeded to sign up for the service and subscribe to some feeds. The selection of news offerings was rather impressive, from many I knew, and several I did not. Most mainstream news sources are supported, and many blogs which I follow on a regular basis were also included as part of the selection process.
The first stumbling block, for me, came in the limit PimpMyNews sets on how many news sources you can subscribe to at once. For your given feed, you can only select ten news sources to hear from on a daily basis. Furthermore, there isn’t any ability to really parse down the content from these sources on your own, so you are completely reliant upon what PimpMyNews chooses to put in your feed. A feature I would like to see the service develop would be subscribe to any number of feeds, and perhaps rotate what sources your hear from each day. For example, I always want a mix of tech, headlines, politics an celebrity news, but the ten sources for this topics would rotate between a predetermined set which I would have specified. Or, the ability to subscribe to tags from certain sources for a particular area of interest (PS3 news, Apple, etc.).
Second: the interface. Ideally, you’ll only have to interact with the interface of PimpMyNews once, because it is very, very annoying to use. Each time I clicked to navigate to a different topic to see which blogs and websites were included, the page refreshed and collapsed the previous topic I was looking at (even if I didn’t want it to). This was annoying to no end to me. I wanted to see if the same blogs under “Gadgets” would also be in “Tech”, and there was no efficient method of doing this! Worse yet, everything I clicked to “subscribe” to a new blog, the entire topic list collapsed down and I was forced to dig through to find exactly what I needed.
Finally, once I had selected all of the blogs I wanted, and subscribed to the iTunes feed PimpMyNews has prepared for me, I waited and was delivered my news stories. And, here’s the surprising fact after all was said and done: it was a pretty damn good service. I thought my biggest problem with PimpMyNews would be the awful mechanical voice which would mispronounce things and speak with the sort of awful cadence that AI voices tend to speak with, but, I was wrong. The narration came out pretty smoothly, and there were very few mispronunciations. The problem, of course, with PimpMyNews, is that there is always something lacking when it comes to getting across written humor into spoken word by something which doesn’t recognized wry wit, sarcasm, and just plain silliness. A sarcastic point which garners a few chuckles while reading text comes across almost uncomfortable when recited by the PimpMyNews audio bots.
Ultimately, I would recommend PimpMyNews to those who don’t really like podcasts, because discussions get tangential and they don’t agree with the personalities of the hosts (Tangential? Personalities of hosts? What does that sound like?) but still enjoy hearing news in the spoken form. I know that sounds contradictory, but it makes sense when you consider that most podcasts are limited in their focus, cover a limited amount of news, and in most cases are released on an infrequent basis (for the pace of the current news cycle, anyway). PimpMyNews allows you to be current, the best advantage of text services, while still retaining the ease of hearing spoken word (you can’t always read when driving, for instance).
The second spoken word service which I checkout was HearPlanet (iTunes store link), an application for the iPhone/iPod touch. HearPlanet combines a whole bunch of things together in one app: location based services, Wikipedia, and spoken word. Basically, the way it works is almost like one of those personal speakers available in museums, which explains the history and details about the various items in front of you. HearPlanet works much in the same way, but with location allowing for different experiences every time you use it. The marketing for HearPlanet plays it as “the world’s first talking travel guide for your cellphone!” I can easily see HearPlanet for this application, especially since it works worldwide. I used HearPlanet just sitting in my house, and I learned all sorts of cool little facts about the immediate area. I’m looking forward to taking it to a city with a little more historical depth (New York, Philadelphia), taking a bus ride around town, and just digging through HearPlanet to learn facts I didn’t know before.
The drawback to HearPlanet is that the mechanical voice is worse then that on PimpMyNews, which can make it much more difficult to sit and listen to things as local roads and monuments which this voice butchers. HearPlanet needs much more refinement on the specific spoken word program they utilize, or perhaps that’s something at a high level which needs to be corrected, but for now, it’s bearable considering how well HearPlanet it able to integrate location with relevant information. It’s reasons like this I’m happy my phone has GPS. HearPlanet WAS a paid application, but since MacWorld 2009, it has been free. If you have an iPhone/iPod touch, I would recommend you snatch it up while you have the chance.
Overall, spoken word services boil down to how good the mechanical voices speaking to you is tolerable or not. Obviously, I have some problems with these voices, but I can bear through it. Before you delve too deeply into any service like this, take the time to see if you enjoy the way these voices sound. It takes a lot to jump from naturally spoken word to mechanically spoken.
Articles, Feature Article
app, audio, computer generated, Hear Planet, iPhone, PimpMyNews.com, Podcast, review
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