This line of thinking began during the recent Australian Federal election campaign. Twitter was a great source of news and information during this time. It was much more up to date with the news than any other source was, with quick tidbits of information that were constantly updated.
In this way Twitter is kind of like talkback radio – a live and constantly updated source of information. Yet it isn’t usually a passive or ambient experience to engage with Twitter. It requires the use of a computer, tablet, or smartphone usually. You can’t find out what’s happening on Twitter while you drive, in the same way you can have talkback radio on as you’re going.
But what if you could? Text to speech systems have come along way recently, and as far as my GPS unit goes, which certainly isn’t top of the line, it gets the pronunciation of most common words correct without sounding stilted. So I’m saying, what if there was a text-to-speech system for Twitter feeds?
It could do for information radio what MP3 players have done for music radio – allow each and every person to create their own personalized stream of audible information. Channels could be based on your entire Twitter feed, Twitter lists or hash tags. It could read out the contents of the actual tweet and the links they include, and if this included audio or video content, then it could play that too.
I’d love a system like this. What do you think?
