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April 23, 2008 6:18 PM PDT

Dixero turns your RSS feeds into podcasts

by Josh Lowensohn

Who doesn't like listening to computer generated human voices for hours at a time? If you're a fan of Microsoft Sam, you should check out Dixero, a service that turns RSS feeds into podcasts you can subscribe to and listen to on your computer or portable devices. The company is showing of its products at this week's Web 2.0 Expo, despite the incredibly noisy show floor.

The listening quality is about the same as Odiogo, a service I looked at a few months back and have used with great success on blogs and news sites that have it integrated. What makes Dixero neat is that you can choose one of three types of voices you'd like to listen to the posts with. It's also nice enough to take your entire OPML file and let you pull in those feeds, then pick which ones you want to fit into individual channels.

The actual player is a little less extensible, offering a simple play/pause button and the option to skip back and forth between posts. You can also grab the RSS feed and subscribe to the feeds as a podcast in your favorite feed catcher. What it's missing is a way to embed it on other sites or swap between the voices--something that's left to the whim of the creator.

Dixero's player lets you skip between blog posts as audio files.

(Credit: CNET Networks)
Josh Lowensohn writes for Webware.com, CNET's blog about Web applications and services. E-mail Josh, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/Josh.
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Add a Comment (Log in or register)
by lucamascaro April 24, 2008 9:58 AM PDT
Hi, I'm the product manager of Dixero.

Thanks for the nice review, tonight we have just release the embed feature and during the next releases we include also the other missing features and we have planned to redesign the player with more functionalities.

Best

Luca
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