With the rising popularity of podcasting, I’ve been thinking about automated information sources that might be interesting. How about the weather?
RSSWeather.com provides RSS weather feeds for different cities. FeedSpeaker is a new .Net application that uses Microsoft’s Speech API to “speak” RSS feeds, recording the results in MP3 format. This is a manual process, but one could easily create a service that did this automatically.
Imagine syncing your MP3 player in the morning and catching the day’s weather forecast. (Or you could just turn on your AM radio, but that’s old school.)
Here are some samples I created for today’s forecast for San Jose, California:
- Male voice: http://cantoni.org/files/WeatherSanJoseCAMale.mp3 (127 KB)
- Female voice: http://cantoni.org/files/WeatherSanJoseCAFemale.mp3 (107 KB)
[Funny aside: because I ran this test a couple times, I must have triggered a warning from RSSWeather; instead of getting weather content, I got a “slow down!” message which was faithfully captured in MP3 format as well: http://cantoni.org/files/SlowDown.mp3 (50 KB)]
Update: Here’s a playlist linking to all three songs: http://cantoni.org/files/weather.m3u