LiveJournal Readback
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What is LJ Readback?
A very simple telephony interface to LiveJournal, call a number to have your LiveJournal friends entries read back to you over the phone (actually it only reads MY friends list at the moment, see below for current status)
Why make this? who would want to use this?
Because I had this really nice text to speech engine from Cepstral (http://www.cepstral.com) that I wanted to use and I like making things that play with LiveJournal.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to use this... perhaps you have a job where you have a phone but no Internet access and want to keep up to date with your LiveJournal friends list... to be honest thats a pretty pathetic way to waste time... don't you have work to be doing?
Current status
- Deprecated, it proved it's point and has no further use :)
- You can currently call the number and have my (lj-user: nadnad) friends list read back to you (public posts only!).
- A version exists that prompts you to enter your username and hear your own friends list, but it's incredibly flakey and requires some more work before it's made public.
- This is a VoIP service and is classed as low-priority so under heavy loads call quality may be poor.
- For some reason the speech engine likes to insert random pauses where they shouldn't belong.
- Truth be told, I only spent about half an hour working on this and there is a whole pile of stuff to do to make it better.
How does this work?
Your call comes into an Asterisk server which fetches the LiveJournal page and converts it to speech using the Cepstral (http://www.cepstral.com) Swift speech engine.
