Dixero makes blogs sound like HAL 9000
Written on 28th July 2008
5 COMMENTS 
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
I was kicking off my daily late-night feed reading as usual, by firing up Netvibes and opening up a bunch of blogs in new tabs, when a computer voice started reading a post from ReadWriteWeb out loud. Besides scaring the hell out of me, it took a while before I realized that the audio snippet actually came from this post on Center Networks and not RWW.
The article teaches us that Swiss-based Dixero has just raised 1,5 million euros for their feed-to-audio conversion technology, bringing their total funding to 3 million euros. Allen Stern from CN embedded a conversion as an example, which started playing automatically. So my first advice for the company if they want to put their fresh funding to good use: loose the autoplay feature, and loose it fast. Having said that, let’s take a look at what Dixero does.
Based in Zürich, Switzerland, Dixero enables you to aggregate your favorite RSS feeds into channels and ‘vocalize’ them, so you can actually listen to blog posts while you’re busy doing other stuff, or download them as podcasts for when you’re on the road (it works on both computers as mobile devices). There’s also some pre-defined channels users can tune into, e.g. the Technology Channel.
Dixero lets you choos
e between different voices (one male, two female) and lets you categorize blogs into multiple channels. There’s of course also a social component, which lets you share audio clips with your friends easily.
The current voices sound a bit creepy to me, much like HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (”Would you like to play a game of chess?“), and I know it’s a service that I won’t be using myself because I don’t see any added value that would improve my blog consuming experience in any way. But the voices are being worked on, according to the company, and who knows if I’m missing something here that you find incredibly useful for you. If that’s the case, be my guest in the comments and explain why you dig Dixero.
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By allen stern on Jul 28, 2008
sorry to scare you :)
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By Patrick de Laive on Jul 28, 2008
I can see value in it for specific interests. I created a channel with some feeds about marketing and lifehacking, blogs I normally do not have enough time for to read. I’m going to try dixero while in the gym.
Furthermore this is a must have service for anyone who has difficulties with reading or can’t see at all.
I’m curious about the quality of it.
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By Robin Wauters on Jul 28, 2008
@Allen yeah, you’d better apologize! ;)
@Patrick very good points, I wonder why Dixero doesn’t mention that type of usage anywhere on their own website.
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By Paul on Jul 29, 2008
Services like these are great for people with reading difficulties (partially sighted, suffer from dyslexia etc).
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By Luca Mascaro on Jul 29, 2008
Hi Robin,
thank you for trying Dixero and talk about it.
Unfortunately, with TTS time needed to improve quality isn’t the same you would imagine in other services, we are working hard and we’ll probably need some more time to do it. As we know that for users quality improvements are the first issue to face, we are now building a 12-months plan totally focused on how to reach the minimum level they need and then increase it, and founds we just raised will be invested on it.
In fact, the first thing we have done is introducing new voices our developers are working on. Right now we’re implementing them and checking their quality, so brand new voices will be available in about two weeks, firstly on new channels, then on all of them.
About where and how to use Dixero, we suggest at each presentation we do to use it in the idle time, waiting the bus, driving the car, doing jogging, doing homeworks… But in fact we still don’t know how people like to use it or if they found sort of usefulness in a way we don’t expect, we’d really like to know it and maybe find a good way to exchange suggestions between users.
As you actually don’t find an added value that let you think Dixero is the service you’d like to use, what do you expect from it? In other words, what can you suggest us (if you want to suggest something, of course :) ) to be closer to what you really need?
Thank you :)
Luca Mascaro
ps, we’re based in Lugano, not in Zürich :)
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