XQuery/XHTML + Voice

Motivation
You want to have your browser read Twitter updates using a text-to-speech conversion extension that is built into your browser.

Method
XHTML + Voice is supported by the Opera Browser with the Voice extension installed. In this simple application it is used as a browser-based Text-to-Speech engine.

= Twitter Radio =

This script creates a simple text-to-speech version of Twitter Search.

Obama

Limitations

 * Window has to be active for the T2S to play on refresh
 * The cleaned text to speak is held in a div which is rendered as white on white text. Initially it was output as a block in the header but it did not seen possible to apply styles. Applying a style display:none hid the text from the T2S engine as well!
 * Transforming the atom content to a a string suitable to speak needs more work.
 * Retweets and similar tweets could be removed using levenstein
 * Male and female voices are assigned randomly by tweet. I'd like to cache the voice assigned to a tweeter so that tweets are consistently spoken in the same voice
 * The initial load doesn't seem to trigger playing, hence the play button, but this also re-fetches the page.
 * This is an ideal situation to use AJAX instead of refresh
 * The T2S engine is quite good at rendering the text but it needs be helped in places, for example by replacing texting abbreviations with their expanded form.

With the style sheet: