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With the increasing popularity of online media, blogs and thematic communities, the volume of generated content increases exponentially. Already, many users physically do not have time to process their subscription, continually clicking on the "red button", deleting all unread articles older than 48 hours. To admit, for me, as very active - both online and offline people, fully read channels - literally a luxury.

Owners of mobile devices with an RSS reader can read articles while away from a desktop computer or laptop. But more difficult, if you sit behind the wheel of a car, play sports, or just walk. It is inconvenient to read the text from the screen at these moments, although this time could also be used to obtain information.

It is quite logical, in my opinion, here is the decision to receive your subscription materials in audio format: convert text to speech, download files to a PDA, player or mobile phone and listen to articles almost anytime and anywhere.
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TTS (Text-to-Speech) systems that synthesize text-to-speech have been around for a long time: back in 1961, human speech was artificially recreated on an IBM 704 computer for the first time. Since that time, of course, much has changed: computers have learned to synthesize voice more realistically, and many software products have been created using TTS technology.
Among them: for English speech - TextAloud , SpeakOut , SAM , for Russian - Digit , Sakrament Talker , Govorilka and many others. Based on TTS-engines, a variety of utilities are created: message readers in IM, translators, applications for mobile devices, toolbars and browser plug-ins, with which you can voice any web page.

Recently, several web services have appeared on the Internet that allow us to deftly convert a text RSS feed into a set of audio recordings that you can download and listen to directly on the site. All of them use different TTS engines and work mostly with English. These are Odiogo , Expressivo , Talkr , TalkingNews , Dixero , PimpMyNews , Vozme , ReadTheWords , Feed2Podcast , BlogBard .



From the above services, you can separately note Odiogo, which not only translates articles into audio at an acceptable level, but also makes it very convenient to manage your streams and audio recordings. With it, by sending the address of any English-language RSS-feed, you can get audio through ordinary web pages, “lightweight” web pages for mobile devices or through a separate RSS-feed. According to the developers, in the future it is planned to expand the range of languages, and let's hope that among them there will be Russian.

With regard to quality, it is worth noting that if the synthesizers of English are noticeably advanced and now produce a more or less realistic voice, then with Russian-speaking TTS engines everything is somewhat worse. One of the most advanced among them is Digalo , while it generates a very dull mutter : not everyone will be able to constantly listen to such audio recordings, forgiving computer swallowed sounds, improper stresses and a monotonous “robot-like” voice.

Therefore, the most active Russian-speaking users will have to be content with the results of the work of imperfect synthesizers or look for other ways to solve the problem, one of which may be the dubbing of articles by living people.

It may sound somewhat unexpected, but in the absence of a high-quality TTS engine for the Russian language, only the live voices of living people can solve our problem at a decent level. Now on the Internet are many agencies that offer the services of professional speakers, who can read any text materials on order. But, unfortunately, these services are more focused on creating promotional videos, and their cost per minute of recording is on average $ 20.

In March, Dubbee service was announced in RuNet, which will offer its users to translate an RSS subscription into an audio format, and all articles will be voiced by people. At the same time, this will happen rather quickly and at a reasonable price (audio recordings older than two days will be distributed freely). Apparently, such a decision, although it will be paid, will definitely solve the problem of high-quality and timely conversion of subscription articles into audio. The service itself is still in development, but now on the Dubbee Intro page you can listen to some articles in audio (including from Habr).

Thus, if there are a lot of specialized web services for materials in English that read the text at a decent level, then there is currently no ready-made convenient solution for getting articles in audio format for Russian-language channels. And in order to somehow solve the problem of processing their RSS subscriptions far from the computer, domestic users need to wait for the emergence of services with support for the Russian language, using either TTS technology or the voice of professional speakers. And if in the first case the problem is in the availability of a high-quality TTS-engine, then in the second - in the payment of all new audio recordings.

- From here