Really Simple Sydication Summarised, and Podcast!

RS³ is Open Source software to take news from an RSS feed, summarize the full entry, and then convert the summary to speech and save the sound as an OGG vorbis file (or MP3 if you must). Basically, web to speech, for busy people who have a LOT of RSS newsfeeds to absorb every day, and want to listen to the content being read to them on their portable digital music device of choice. In February 2002 and again in 2004, Matthew told me that he wanted something to read the news to him from the web. Your wish is granted! This also has a huge potential to help disabled people access any RSS feeds on the net. It takes the latest full entries from the RSS feed, converts it to simple text without any ads or pictures using the GNU Open Text Summarizer. This gets fed to the Festival speech synthesis program from the University of Edinburgh, and your favourite blogs get converted into sound bite podcasts.