Thanks to AJ at Effortless Language Acquisition for recommending Talkr. I think that this is a great idea. I have been wondering how we could use a page reader as a Podcast and Talkr seem to have done this.

I’m still working out the bugs (getting summaries only), but I have added both the feed for the entire blog (button on the bottom, right-hand side of the page) and a link at the bottom of each post to the audio.

Now you may ask, what is this good for? The computer-generated voice is unnatural sounding, there are many pronunciation mistakes, etc…. Why not just add audio to the blog? All of these are good and valid criticisms. My only answer is, it is as good as it gets for someone without the time or will to do both a text entry and audio entry to their blog.

Even with the obvious drawbacks, this service is amazingly good. Computer readers have come a long way, with some very natural transitions (linking and merging) and it works on your existing RSS feed.