Calling All Podcasters

Yodio, a Web community for creating and sharing personal audio recordings, today launched an audio publishing service and online marketplace that makes podcasting available to everyone.

The service makes it easy to record personalized audio tracks or upload pre-recorded MP3 files, mix them with digital images, and publish them to the Web for purchase and download. All that's needed is a telephone—to dial into Yodio's toll-free number—and a computer with an Internet connection.

The service uses speech recognition technology from Gold Systems to recognize caller input such as name, number, and responses to prompts.

Content can be packaged as:

- A Yodiocard, a free two-minute audio greeting or profile that can be customized with a photo and emailed or posted to any HTML-supported Web site;

- A Yodiocast, an unlimited single-track audio recording and image that can be personalized, categorized and priced by the user;

- A Yodiotour, an unlimited, multi-track audio album with synchronized images.

- A Community Forum for file-sharing and discussion; and

- A Marketplace, a stored-value system that enables users to price and download yodiocasts and yodiotours via PayPal and through merchant banks, with a micro-payment system handling royalty payments to content creators.

"Yodio is certainly an interesting and unique concept that reflects the greater movement towards Web 2.0 - the next paradigm in leveraging new Web technology," says Daniel Hong, lead analyst at Datamonitor. "Because the phone channel is critical to the success of Yodio, the company's decision to use speech recognition to automate, capture and catalog information makes perfect sense, as does its plans on simplifying the podcasting process."   

Yodio has other ideas for using speech that it plans to implement down the road. "Where we want to go with this is to have the ability to drop in SALT-based templates," says David Jennings, co-founder and chief operating officer at Yodio, "After we know the type of content people are using, we can create a template and drop it into the system and the prompting will follow the script for the temp users for information and capture the information."

"Essentially what we would be doing is pre-scripting for the users based on the content of the recording which is designed to remove the friction from podcasting," Jennings explains.