RobotRadio.net - automated streaming web (and satellite radio) talk show, with synthesized voices (bot jocks) reading the news from RSS/blog feeds and occasionally, PD or Open Source text (i.e., Gutenberg) - "the talk of the Internet." "Caller" comments entered via web form and read by robots and/or listener phone calls digitzed and stored. Sponsors submit text for robots and/or audio. Audio extra. Robot jocks do intros, outros, narrations (all pre-scripted). Web form submissions are free, but you can't pick voice (generic avatar) Pay submissions include customization of voice (custom avatar). Repeat rants welcome, treated as text commercials. Can schedule repeats and times. Phone calls are paid as well. Instant feedback yes/no/boring via web site. Web site streams text as botjocks speak. Listener blog submissions. Listener requests. Listener BBS/community. Eventually, on web, Ananova-type robots deliver news. Background is 24/7 streaming synth/background audio either algorithmically composed live or mixed from royalty free SFX CDDs. What we need to build: The geeky grail: *working demo* Where I am: * curl RSS grabber - beta * Python RSS parser - got this running just tonight - alpha * 'say' Perl interface to TTS - beta Still to do: * figure out the remaining Unix | 's or > shell scripts * extend shell script to take audio out to another process to stream encoder At this point I shouuld be able to test locally on the voidlan. When this basic setup is built, it's time to * find an OSX server out there somewhere we can test and show proof of concept * begin integration with radio automation juarez * start writing scripts for bot jocks * develop resource list of RSS feeds * develop web app (this is big! both front and back end) to take/process/use 'calls' Registrant: Dennis Wilen 2385 Roscomare Road Los Angeles, CA 90077 US Registrar: DOTSTER Domain Name: ROBOTRADIO.NET Created on: 08-MAR-03 Expires on: 08-MAR-04 Last Updated on: 08-MAR-03 Administrative, Technical Contact: Wilen, Dennis dwilen@yahoo.com 2385 Roscomare Road Los Angeles, CA 90077 US 310-471-7753 For you new visitors who don't know me, I have been trying not only to spread but also to actualize this meme about the Internet: It's about the uploads. That is to say the Net is two-way. It is more than a pipe for THEIR content. It's about OUR content. My last net-art project, the SpaceBrothers World Tour, was all about the uploads - amazing content I got from e-people around the world. This is in the same vein, except we're moving from art/entertainment to an actual product/service. The heart of the endeavor is using the net and net tools to communicate the net reality. Blogs, news feeds, sites of the day, etc., are mostly text. With RobotRadio, we read it you. Well, these voices, as real as the digital info they transmute, read it to you. And you can control what they read and you can respond via the web. (See the potential programming file for more.) Talk radio. With robots. Whee! At the heart will be a little GPL'd or CC'd app that grabs the feeds, parses the feeds, then "renders" the feeds with TTS. You can use our little app/script on your own machine if you want; me, I'm gonna build this little 'talk radio station' I have in mind. I need volunteer shell scripters / Cocoa programmers who can help me tie my hacks into a nice GUI app that's flexible and can scale. It's the future, now. Computers talk, now. Let's do it, now. P.S. Back in the early days of FM radio, I was doing similar stuff. As a matter of fact, I think the success of Bonnie Raitt and Billy Joel in "breaking out" nationally from (my) Philadelphia market was due to similar beliefs in the value of the Creative Commons kinda share and share alike process, although we certainly had no idea then about what it all would lead to. The old Bonnie live track of mine at SpaceBrothers.com is still a major download - what is it - almost 30 years later?