The multimedia advances on the Web are great. I’m a daily devotee of Rocketboom. I download jam band concerts (legally) using BitTorrent. The way I feel about podcasting should be pretty obvious. But not every multimedia development is a good idea.

I tried a NewsBot today. The creation of UK-based Advanced Chatbot Solutions (ACS), NewsBots are virtual newscasters, animated avitars that read a RSS feeds using text-to-voice capabilities. The result is in effective and somewhat disturbing. More to the point, though, it defeats the benefits of reading text on a web page.

When I get to a web page—whether it’s a blog or a news site—I scan that page looking for headlines that appeal to me. Reading every word on the page would be far too time-consuming. RSS news readers even further reduce the amount of time spent on any given page. So what makes the folks at ACS think anybody would want to sit and listen to an avatar read every word on the page out loud? Further, the text-to-voice translation is jerky and often difficult to understand. And how long can you look at the animated newscaster moving her lips? (The fact that her eyes follow your cursor doesn’t make it any more compelling.)

ACS’s chatbots have been available for other purposes, such as customer support: Ask the chatbot a question and she’ll answer (sometimes in text, sometimes by speaking). I’d rather talk to a real person, frankly, and having a chatbot ask survey questions isn’t all that appealing either. But the idea of the newscasting chatbot is the least effective of them all. The ACS web site claims the NewsBots will make your site more memorable, drive traffic, and increase sales. I won’t hold my breath for evidence to support the claim.

As my colleague Neville Hobson says, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.