Read my Feed – from RSS to SIP

Abstract: RRS 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 trough 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.