Talkr Blog

Free Voice Chat for Online Gamers--No Downloads or Server required

2007-09-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

People have told us and told us that Talkr Live Voice is perfect for online gamers. So here it is and best all its free!

Try it out and forward us any questions or comments at support@talkr.com

You can start the using the beta at gamer.talkr.com and remember there's no software to download!

And chatting can be dynamic... in fact, you don't even have to register before you start chatting! You can just enter a chat name and begin chatting with friends (as long as the chat name is not already in use.)

But... if you do take the time to register, then the chats you create while you're logged in can be password protected (if desired) and the chat names you choose will be reserved for your use as long as you are registered. And you can create as many chatrooms as you'd like!

You -- and other gamers -- can always find each others chats by returning to gamer.talkr.com and searching by chat names, user names, or tags. But you can also cut and paste the code we offer on the page that lets you place your chats on any Web page or blog, including your Guild pages.

Just to remind you what a great product this is... review the features below... and remember, we're counting on you to help us make it eve better!

Thanks for your interest and support,

The Talkr Team

Free Voice Chat for Online Gamers!

No charges of any kind!

No downloads of client software!

No servers to maintain - you use our voice servers!

Up to 40 people per chatroom!

Chatrooms can be password protected, or not!

Place widgets and links on guild pages, MySpace profiles and blogs to make your chat readily available to anyone viewing the page!

Dynamic chatting - meet a stranger in-game and be chatting within minutes

Easy to Use

Unlimited free usage!

Just register an account, or log in if you already have one

Search for someone else's chatroom or create your own

Add tags for your chatrooms and yourself so others can chat with you

Talkr FeedFlare for Feedburner

2007-08-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

"Listen to This!" Can easily be added to your FeedBurner with the use of a FeedFlare. This feature will allow you to increase your feeds' accessibility and helping you to reach a bigger audience.

Simply login into Feedburner and click on the "Optimize". Then click on FeedFlare and add a personal feedflare with the url location of

http://admin.talkr.com/feedflare1.xml

Then save it and your feed has been upgraded.

Talkr Mail – just a little fun!

2007-08-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

Talkr’s first big claim to fame was its popular text-to-speech service where we automatically convert text-only blogs to podcasts. But some of our users would like – from time to time – to create podcasts using their own voices.

This is a simple tool that lets you create an mp3 easily, using your mic, and email it to others. Eventually, we’ll automate the Talkr text-to-speech service to accept these audio emails and convert them to podcasts… but in the meantime, people can use this tool to send talking emails…

Click below to begin the download!

Talkr’s New Voice Chat Recorder!

2007-08-31T13:32:00.000-07:00

Another great tool that’s useful for all Talkr users whether they’re gamers, using social networks or even having blog-driven discussions.

Our earliest beta testers began asking for ways to record their voice chats so they could turn them into podcasts. This small downloadable tool does exactly that… when its turned on, it captures the sound from your mic as well as the sound playing over your speakers, and turns them into an mp3. This mp3 can be placed on a web site using our new flash player, or inserted into RSS feeds to create podcasts and lots lots more.

Click here to begin the download!

Talkr’s new Push To Talk tool!

2007-08-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

When you’re involved in a long voice chat – whether it’s on your MySpace page or on a WoW quest – you don’t want to worry about background noise (or heavy breathing!) hurting the quality of the chat for everyone else.

So, we developed a simple Push-to-talk tool that can be used with Talkr. It’s a small downloadable tool that lets you toggle your microphone on and off so you’re only broadcasting when you want to be broadcasting.

NOTE: This tool doesn’t actually mute your microphone, it simply turns the volume down as low as it can go… so if you have some other setting turned up insanely high, its possible that a low level of voice could still get through… our goal was to let you minimize ambient noise over your mic, while intertfering with your PC as little as possible.

Click here and then on the download button!

New Single MP3 Flash Player for post in New Google Blogspot templates

2007-08-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

See the flash player above.

Click the play triangle on the above player to listen this post read to you. You can get your own to increase your blog's accessibility and in doing so reach a new audience.

In order to add Talkr Player to your blog, you'll need to insert a small piece of code near the post metadata (author, date, comments, etc) in your template. Fortunately, this is really easy (really!) — just follow these four short steps.

1. Sign in to Blogger.

For the blog to which you're adding Talkr Player, click "Manage Layout".

Editing Blogger "Layouts"

Copy this code:

2. In Blogger, click "Edit HTML".

You should see the HTML for your blog template.

3.Click the "Expand Widget Templates" box above and to the right of the template code.

In your template code, scroll to:

Paste the code from step 1 just below

<div class="'post"> .

(Don't see this code? You may be using a customized or non-standard Blogger template. Don't panic! Paste the code near the post metadata (author, date, comments, etc) or contact us for help.)

4. Click [Save Template].

Click "View Blog" to see what you've done, and enjoy!

Make Your Blog Wildly Accessible!

2007-08-15T14:05:00.000-07:00

OK... there have been a lot of requests for this!

Talkr Radio combines our popular text-to-speech service with a sophisticated Flash media player. Its easier to use and more sexy than our traditional Talkr interface and is a feature that has been much requested by the Talkr community.

Talkr Radio accepts an RSS feed as input, places its posts’ titles in the Flash player’s playlist and converts and plays those text-only posts as audio.

We hope you’ll enjoy Talkr Radio’s flexibility and ease of use and we’ve included links to Talkr Radio stations for 50 of the most popular blogs at Talkr Radio Directory. Click on a link there and check out a cool blog!

In our player, click on a playlist entry and you’ll hear that post read to you (it can take a few seconds if we’re busy). You can also click on the small symbol to the right of a playlist entry and you’ll be taken to the original text-only post of the blog being covered.

We encourage folks to cut/paste the code for any of these Talkr Radio stations and place them on your own blogs or web sites.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Create a Talkr Radio Station for your own blog!

You can also create your own Talkr Radio station for your blog by using this simple wizard Talkr Radio Wizard. We encourage this – and its free – because we’ve learned that a lot of people enjoy the audio… maybe they want to be able to type while they listen, or are vision-impaired. But give a try and your audience will thank you!

[Quick technical note: this wizard will work with all RSS feeds from Feedburner, for example, but the player is unable to take the feeds directly from some domains because of the crossdomain issues that exist with Flash. In those cases, you can either run those feeds through Feedburner, or simply use Talkr.com to make it work (email us -- radio@talkr.com -- if you have problems!)]

If you create a cool Talkr Radio station and want to be included on this directory (or want us to remove your blog from this entry), just email us at radio@talkr.com.

Talkr Integrated into JW Flash Players

2007-07-02T14:48:00.001-07:00

Talkr.com’s Web-leading text-to-speech service has been integrated into the family of JW Flash players and is easily available to all!

Most people use flash players to play music or videos… now there’s a new option: listening to your favorite blogs or text RSS feeds.

You can send a JW flash player a text-only RSS feed – in the same way you would send it an RSS playlist of songs – and each post in the feed will be converted to an MP3 and entered in the playlist.

Most simply, here is a link to a player where I take a news feed from CNN directly into the JW player and let the player convert the text feed to mp3s and create a playlist:

Talkr CNN demo

Here’s another example where I used FeedBlendr.com to blend text feeds from CNN, ESPN and MSNBC into a single feed and listen to it via the JW player:

Talkr Feedblendr demo

Here’s another example where I use a JW player to listen to my RSS feed from Ebay where I search for first edition books:

Talkr Ebay demo

___________________________________________________________________________

In the last two examples, the player is unable to take the feeds directly from FeedBlendr.com and Ebay because of the crossdomain issues that exist with Flash (and that Jeroen covers in detail elsewhere better than we can). In that case, you can simply use Talkr.com to make it work:

1) Come to Talkr.com and register as a user, here Register at Talkr .

2) Then go to Search for Feeds here Search for Your Feed and type in the feed giving in problems.

3) Talkr will convert that text feed to a new feed with MP3s already built in, simply use that new feed address as the input to the player. To see all the feeds you’ve created, first sign in then go here My Feeds

Back in the saddle!

2007-04-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

Not much news to post lately as we've been up to our neck developing new features.

There are new features on the way for our new flagship Talkr voice conferencing platform, including the ability to use it on MySpace pages... as well as some navigational improvements.

And there are new features coming to Talkr's Text-to-Speech service too. It's more flexible and more powerful...

Last but not least, we're developing some new tools that - while they may function on a stand-alone basis when they're first released -- will soon be integrated into the Talkr platforms. We're thinking about calling these Talkr Tools, but we'll get back to you on that!

Stand by and we'll keep you posted.

http://www.talkr.com/audio/t/a/l/k/1171433.mp3

International Traffic !

2007-04-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

I know we here at LiveOnTheNet and Talkr have a lot to learn about the blogosphere. Chris Brooks -- the founder of Talkr -- is kind enough to tutor us along the way, but there's no better way to learn than just jumping in... so we did.

I've been amazed to watch how our story about our new instant voice conferencing platform has propagated around the world! This is thanks, of course, to the bloggers who have covered the story from different locales and in different languages.

This has been a thrill to us... small town folks that we are. Its great to go to Technorati and see the various languages...

Our favorites include:

http://internetno.net/2007/03/30/is-8-syityiy-moy-krug-pozitiv-i-negativ-ot-google-eskalatsiya-aktivnosti-gigantov-i-karlikov/

and a very thoughtful write-up from Benoit Descary at

http://descary.com/?p=369

and also

http://blog.mytech.it/index.php/2007/03/29/talkrcom-novita-in-arrivo/

And I hate to cut if off here, bit I'm told my posts are usually too long!

http://www.nithar.com/2007/03/29/talkr-launched-new-instant-voice-conference-widget/

Thanks for all the traffic and the great coverage!

Lots of new users and great comments!

2007-03-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

Well, we're over 150 users signed up for the the new live conferencing tool... exciting!

Pete at Mashable gave us a review with remarkably quick turnaround... he seemed to really like the concept of voice conferencing on blogs (and while mashable.com is a great blog itself, it is a blog focused on social nets... so Pete has two good perspectives here), he didn't like Java at all. He's a big fan of flash and spanked us for not using it.

I responded in a brief comment pointing out that when we began development on this VOIP tool, Flash was not really an option... it couldn't handle some tasks we needed to handle in a softphone. But, in their recent flash upgrade, I understand these issues have been addressed. So, we're taking Pete's comments to heart and are looking at a Flash version.

I also pointed out that when I labeled us a widget, I probably invited comparisons to other lightweight, sexy flash widgets out there. In fact, we are actually a full-blown VOIP softphone and are more comparable to Skype, Gtalk, Paltalk and others... those phones require you to download a client and don't have nearly as powerful of conferencing capabilities as we do...

Among the other good comments have been:

1) Need better instructions for how to use this thing (uhh... we agree. we're working on it. sorry!).

2) The widget should be made smaller so it can fit in a blog sidebar... a creative blogger at Singabloodypore figured out that you can just edit the width variable in the Javascript line and make it as skinny as you want! This means you can't see the number of active listeners, but we're working on a skinny version that will preserve all the info and STILL fit in a sidebar.

3) And folks want to be able to record their conference calls and create podcasts... as Talkr, we applaud that heartily and are working on that too and will have a clever solution ready ASAP. We think that could be a revolutionary application of this technology!

Time for lunch... and to check the new sign-ups! Later.

VoIP Now: Talkr Voice Conferencing

2007-03-30T12:55:00.000-07:00

VoIP Now: Talkr Voice Conferencing

Good article on VOIPnow that gets it, vis a vis podcasting. The live conferences will be exciting in and of themselves, but soon you'll be able to record and publish the calls as podcasts. That was a major reason for our acquisition of Talkr... getting an effective platform for the distribution of audio!

Quick comment... the author correctly notes that we should all be concerned about spammers entering our conference calls. We've reduced barriers for participation to almost zero... so of course, unscrupulous people will be taking advantage of that fact. This interference could be rough for bloggers and perhaps even worse when we roll out the version for social nets (what's worse than spammers? telemarketers!).

But, even our first version lets bloggers password protect their conferences (and create multiple conferences)... so if they want to have segregated, protected chats.its easy to do so. Maybe voice passwords are handed out upon registration, or a subscription to an RSS feed, something like that. Please give us your thoughts on how this would work the best.

In addition, we've got a whole bevy of moderating tools in the works... killing users that misbehave, etc. These will be crucial for really large chats. For example, when we webcast the 1996 Democratic National Convention, we had hundreds of people in multiple chats with Senators, cabinet members, etc. and we couldn't have done that without moderating tools.

We'll keep you posted on those developments, too.

News from the Launch!

2007-03-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

Some Cool Applications of the Talkr Widget... and a few mea culpas

For yesterday's launch, we intentionally avoided press coverage to have a chance to react to any issues that arose. Nevertheless, within the first hour after our limited beta opened, over 30 bloggers had signed up... THANKS!

And there has already been some great feedback... bloggers are very curious about this technology. Here are some ideas and clarifications that might benefit all:

1) OK... first, we should have mentioned more prominently that you might need to update your Java. We need JRE 1.5 or better. And, if you want to talk, rather than just listen, you need a microphone. We could have been more clear about both these things. I'm sure more of my slips will be called to my attention later...

2) And I should have really emphasized at the outset that this voice conferencing service will be free to the bloggers and free to their audiences... our goal is to make it audio-ad-supported! And revenue will be shared with the bloggers once it starts flowing. More on this below...

3) Bloggers can embed the new Talkr widget on their blogs and their audience members (with a simple click, no downloads of a client or anything) can join in a live, multiparty voice conference call.

The blogger can be in the voice conference leading the discussion, or simply leave it open for his/her audience to talk among themselves on the blog's topics, 24/7.

4) In addition, a group of blogs focused on a similar topic (say "liberal US politics" or "Web 2.0") can all embed the same widget which points to a single "shared" voice conference on that shared topic... all these blogs could point to a single voice chat, and each blog's audience can interact with the other blogs' audiences. This can "aggregate audience" across blogs willing to cooperate to build traffic.

5) These conference calls can also be password protected if a blogger want to limit access to "subscribers" or something... and the pasword can be changed regularly to enforce good behavior, for example.

6) We'll soon be releasing the tools that will allow a blogger to record their conference calls... for example, a blogger can record his/her chat featuring three "guest experts" discussing the state of Web 2.0 with a few audience members. Then the blogger can attach this mp3 to a podcast (an interactive, multiparty podcast, at that) on the topic.

---------------------------

So... we are giving bloggers an easy, free way to get into live conversations with their audience, as well as other bloggers interested in the same topic.

To what end? Hopefully... money...

As we said when announcing the Talkr acquisition, we plan on attracting audio ads to the traditional text-to-speech Talkr which is why we've eliminated the old subscription model for end users.

We'll also be trying to introduce audio ads to the live voice conferencing as well... for example, every audience member will soon hear a very short audio ad as they enter a voice conference. They currently hear a "Welcome to LiveOnTheNet" placeholder...

And we'll also be placing audio ads in the podcasts of the live chats as well...

When we get the revenue flowing, we'll be sharing that with the bloggers that create and drive the voice conference calls. There's a lot to be figured out there, but that's the kind of "high class problem" that the bloggers and we would like to have, I imagine.

New Live Talkr beta

2007-03-26T05:07:00.000-07:00

Hi ! I'm Roger Schneider, the CEO of LiveOnTheNet.com and I want to welcome you to our new Talkr blog.

Our company recently acquired the popular text-to-speech service (TTS), Talkr.com, and are thrilled to integrate this excellent technology into our base of products.

We are excited about the text-to-speech service and are expanding and refining the Talkr TTS product as we speak -- adding new features, upgrading servers, lots of stuff. Thousands of bloggers use Talkr TTS and the number grows every day. And we have plans to really increase that growth.

In addition, we are releasing our new beta of a highly innovative voice conferencing platform ! It features a revolutionary voice widget that requires no software client or downloads.

This free, technology-enabled service lets people easily find, join, create, manage and promote voice conversations - among many participants - over the Internet.
It allows users to interact with other people on the topics they care about - they can invite others to join them to talk about issues of mutual interest, or they can join other ongoing conversations.

Users can open their conversations up to large or small groups of their fellow enthusiasts through open or password-protected conferences.

In short, it will let people talk online like they've never talked before... and this exciting new product is the new Talkr. Learn about and even try the beta at new.talkr.com !

And we'd love to hear your questions, comments, remarks, bug reports -- anything you want to tell us -- throught this blog or any of the avenues we've created to hear from you. You can even get us on your own Talkr ! We'd love to hear from you.

New Blog for a new TALKr

2007-02-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

LiveOnTheNet acquires Text-To-Speech service, Talkr.com

Huntsville, AL, February 19, 2007: LiveOnTheNet.com, Inc., a Huntsville-based online media company, announced today that it has acquired Talkr.com. Talkr is an innovative Web 2.0 service that lets users listen to their favorite text-only blogs. Talkr's sale comes in the wake of Google's announcement in December that they are expanding from text-only internet ads to audio ads in the closely-related world of radio advertising. Thousands of bloggers currently use Talkr's service to podcast their blogs.

Talkr founder, Chris Brooks said "It was time to take Talkr to the next level, and LiveOnTheNet is the right partner to do exactly that. Plus, it was important to me to find a partner that was committed to providing bloggers with excellent support and improved features. The bloggers that work with Talkr deserve that, and I'm proud to say that I found a corporate parent for Talkr that shares that vision."

Roger Schneider, the CEO of LiveOnTheNet, emphasized that "Talkr will remain focused on supporting bloggers as new business models emerge. The biggest thing we can do is to increase access to bloggers' work and help them generate revenue, so we'll be expanding Talkr's services to generate a critical mass of advertising avails by, among other things, making Talkr services free to the public. Most importantly, we'll integrate Talkr and LiveOnTheNet's revolutionary new embeddable voice chat client. It requires absolutely no downloaded software and supports live, spontaneous, dynamic voice chats among lots of callers."

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but included a substantial cash payment and a royalty on future revenues.