About Read My Feed

It is a vocal browser based on technologies, protocols e open components, which generates dynamic VoiceXML pages starting from RSS contents. Pages are read through the Asterisk Softswitch, thanks to his extension VoiceGlue, and after they have been rendered in audio by Festival voice synthesis.

Thus, RSS web feeds are read by a synthetic voice, trough a SIP VoIP call, offering eye-free access to huge amount of classified textual content available on the Web. DTMF browsing allows to choose in between different RSS providers, and to cycle through RRS titles, until the desired full article is selected, and read.

The main content in the page is located by explicit parsing for known feeds, or by heuristic reasoning for new feeds and pages, which can be directly accessed by passing their URI as a SIP address parameter.

Scalability is attained by caching of network and audio data instances, and expressivity improved by generation of SSML markup on the basis of the original HTML and CSS code.

The whole system is made of a collection of Open Source components and public W3C standards, and the use of Festival for Speech Synthesis makes the service available for any supported language.

You can use the service by directly calling the SIP address

or by copying it in you SIP UserAgent, or by using it with a Flash User Agent. Moreover, direct access to feeds (reachable or not by DTMF browsing), can be obtained by adding some optional parameters to the called SIP address, according to the general syntax

where parameters can be the concatenation, separated by a semicolon (;), of some of the following elements:

• feedurl=<URI>; where <URI> is the RSS feed address. e.g. feedurl=http://www.unita.it/drss.php;
• feedmax=<number>; where <number> is how many titles should be listed, e.g feedmax=5;
• readall=<boolean>; where <boolean> determines if the page should be read entirely, or should be limited to the more relevant content, eg readall=yes.