We use a distributed network of converter bots to handle the work queue. Jobs are placed on the queue via api calls from the javascript client that interacts with twitter's search api directly in order to avoid rate limiting of a centralized search server. Our app server is a lightweight Sinatra service that handles job queueing. We stream the audio directly from our nginx web server as they become available via the conversion process.
We are trying to decide if this app has a real use case or if it's just a fun thing. One of the ideas we are thinking about is an iphone app for keeping up with your tweet stream on the go. We would love to hear your feedback.
Incase anyone does want to do this, Apple doesn't directly tell you when a song is starting/stopping, but they do tell you how long the song is (with MPMediaItem and the key MPMediaItemPropertyPlaybackDuration) and how far into the song you are (with MPMusicPlayerController).
Good job getting it up and running. What do you use for text to speech conversion?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1665119/how-to-play-a-son...
* tried to check out the about section of your site, but the feed kept moving the footer down. Maybe lock the footer in place or put that info to the side of the feed.
* A few repeated/stuttered sections. I heard this a few times during reads, but there didn't seem to be any specific thing that caused it.
* Speech cuts off after :
Feature requests:
* Log in with twitter account. Then I can hear my friend updates.
* Customization options> voicing, announcements (says, wants it to be known, is excited... Sometimes they can get annoying)
* Pause button
* Literal reads (instead of says to @xxx, it could say ... says 'ar tee at xxxx, blah blah blah'
All in all I really like this site. It's beautifully done and is actually quite entertaining.
As for the feature requests, logging in to view your personal feed and the pause button are on our roadmap and should be added soon.
You make a good point about the lead-ins. We initially had a bunch of silly lead-ins, but we've been getting consistent feedback that we should just keep it simple. We've already trimmed down the lead-ins significantly. Sounds like we should keep trimming.
Awesome.
I didn't look too deeply at it, would be very very good to be able to filter out dupes (ie: exclude any RT's).
I assume the "music" in between readings is supposed to sound like the radio is tuning for a new station? If this is the case, it's a neat idea, but it was a little frustrating because you want to hear the music, but it's not clear - although I'm not sure on any better suggestion (i.e. elevator music, muzak..lol).
brk 23 has a good point about filters, that would definitely make it more usable.
Nice work! Haven't seen any other fun web integration of text-speech like this (I definitely don't count dictionary.com pronouncing words for me as fun!)
Agree with the suggestions mentioned already (mute, remove extra commentary).
Well done overall! I will be featuring TweetRad.io on http://TweetSocial.com/directory.php shortly.
Kinda says something about America though when not only are we too lazy to write full blogs, read full blogs, but now we don't even want to read our tweets. This of course is not a serious comment on your project as more as it is commentary on America's priorities.
Awesome work and amazing landing page design!
One issue: When speaking the number $44B, it was pronounced as "4 B" as in "four bee"
The radio sounds and overall UI/UX are brilliant though.
Thanks.
Not acceptable.
