Hear Any RSS Feed

9. March 2007, 13:53 UhrVikas Sah

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Recently lee in a comment on the article Let The Computer Read PDF Docs For You wondered how nice it would be to have blog postings read out loud (may be mp3 on a CD). I thought may be I should try and work on it. I wrote a rudimentary application to which you can feed any valid RSS feed and it will read the feed to you (yes you will hear sound!)

For this application I used ASP .NET 2.0 along with Microsoft Speech API.

Here is the main snippet of code:

    private void SoundFeed(string url, int itemCount)
    {
        try
        {
            RssFeed feed = RssFeed.Read(url);
            RssChannel channel = (RssChannel)feed.Channels[0];

            if (channel.Items.Count > 0)
            {
                SpVoice readr = new SpVoice();
                readr.Speak("Your are listening to " +
                    channel.Title + ".",
                    SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault);

                int counter = 1; // num of items tracker
                foreach (RssItem item in channel.Items)
                {
                    if (counter > itemCount)
                        break;
                    if (!item.Title.Trim().Equals(string.Empty))
                    {
                        readr.Speak("Reading Item " +
                            counter.ToString() + ".",
                            SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault);
                        readr.Speak("Title of the Post: ",
                            SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault);
                        readr.Speak(item.Title.Trim(),
                            SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault);
                        readr.Pause();
                    }

                    if (!item.Description.Trim().Equals(string.Empty))
                    {
                        readr.Resume();
                        readr.Speak(item.Description.Trim(),
                            SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault);
                    }

                    counter++;
                }
            }

        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            throw (ex);
        }
    }