Disabled Odiogo service on my jugad2 blog due to new terms unclear

By Vasudev Ram

I disabled Odiogo.com service (for automatically converting the post content to audio - you could listen by streaming or download an MP3) on my blog jugad2.blogspot.com (this blog).

It used to be free till now but recently I got an email from them saying that it is going to be paid under certain conditions from now on.

As I tweeted earlier at:

http://twitter.com/vasudevram/status/53964740388597760

they have not clarified the new terms which involve payment based on some vague / not clearly defined (at least to me) concept of a "threshold". I could be wrong or maybe I have not interpreted the new terms correctly but when they have not responded to my email asking for clarifications, after a few days, I thought it better to disable the service rather than be surprised later by some sudden large bill from them for using it - particularly since I think their terms said the charges may be on a per download (MP3) basis.

So I have disabled it with effect from now.

Sorry for the inconvenience, readers.

Posted via email

- Vasudev Ram

www.dancingbison.com

Odiogo text-to-speech quality is quite good now

By Vasudev Ram

Odiogo, whose text-to-speech (a.k.a. speech synthesis) service I use on this blog of mine, seems to have improved the quality of the service, that is, the quality of the synthesized speech. I tried it just now (after a while - it was reasonably good even earlier), and was surprised to find that it was almost completely intelligible / correct. I tried it out on this blog post about Disqus that I wrote earlier today, and found that, apart from two minor points, the speech synthesis seemed almost flawless. The two points were:

- it ran together words from separate sentences that were not separated by a period or full stop (such as my name at the top of the post followed by the first sentence of the post itself); but that's probably not a flaw anyway.

- it did not pronounce my name correctly, but again, that's probably because it's an Indian name and the "voice" was a Western one, so its built-in vocabulary would not include my name.

Cool service. Check it out if you are interested in text-to-speech. The service is free for personal blogs.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Share this post: