Odiogo RSS Text-To-Speech

Want to listen to the latest news when you’re at the gym, home or at work? Want to listen to the flash news happening across the globe? Here’s a chance for you to do that.

Odiogo Audio News To Go now allows you to download the contents of the RSS feeds that you’re interested in onto your MP3 player or iPod. You’re provided with the facility to create a “podcast” of the information available on any website with an RSS feed. You can start Odiogo and “refresh” to get the latest updates available in the RSS feed of a particular site.

Minimum Requirements to use Odigo’s podcast feature

• A PC installed with WIN XP or WIN 2000 with at least 5GB drive space.
• Minimum 128 MB RAM.
• An MP3 player /iPod /mobile handset /PDA, which can play MP3 files, is required to play the audio files containing the news content.
• Dialup or Broadband Internet connectivity to download the RSS feed from websites.

The Pros of the podcasting feature in Odiogo

• There’s no restriction on the number of RSS feed that you can add.
• Odigo supports all portable MP3 players and iPod.
• The size of the audio file containing the RSS feed in the form of voice is only 2MB per site.
• It’s customizable. You can listen to the business page of New York Times and Sports page of USA Today with Odiogo.

The Cons of the podcast feature in Odiogo

• You can listen to the updates only from websites that support RSS feeds.
• Its not a freeware and is available for $30. Tough to compete against some free Instant Messengers that have started supporting podcast play. Though they don’t necessarily offer free text-to-speech.

It’s a bit more useful, I think, than the pseudo voice mail-to-email feature of GotVoice, which is kind of the opposite.