SITEPAL AND IT'S TALKING HEADS ARE CAUSING A NIGHTMARE FOR A SMALL HOSTING FIRM
SitePal, developed by Oddcast, creates a wide variety of innovative animated speaking characters that are placed on web sites to make them more interesting.
Though widely in use, one of the users, a small web hosting firm reported that
they have been having major problems in trying to obtain tech support from Sitepal and that they lost some business as a result of recent problems with
malfunctions of these talking heads.

According to our informant (we'll call him Mr. X), his company placed talking heads on the web sites of over 25 clients, and suddenly all of the talking heads ceased to function, due to problems on the ODDCAST servers. According to Mr. X, he phoned ODDCAST many times and sent them emails many times over a several day period, and most emails went unanswered as did all phone calls. We checked Mr. X's email history to confirm this.

In one of the emails Mr. X was informed that he needed to remove security from the talking head control panel to make things work temporarily, which he claims he did. To make a long story short the heads finally started working, but a day later they stopped working again, causing Mr. X to have to edit each and every site, since once again he could not reach ODDCAST tech support or have them repond to him in a timely way.

Talking Heads are nothing new to this writer, and I definitely feel they have their value, but I tested the SITEPAL system with the help of Mr. X, who allowed me to log into his account.

When I was all through, I came away from the experience with two observations. One was that it was a grueling task to enter "text to speech" functions so that talking head digital announcers would read a text script entered by the user.   One announcer would read a word so that it was descernable, while another announcer would not, and certain words could not be pronounced properly unless you edited the word in some way.  

The largest drawback in my opinion, after reviewing the complaints of Mr. X, is that all talking heads code resides on the ODDCAST server, and the talking heads do not stream off of the user's web site. Problem here is that people like Mr. X who are placing talking heads on multiple web sites are definitely going to get a ton of complains each time the heads disappear due to technical problems on the ODDCAST server, and if not fixed quickly, a nightmare like the one experienced by Mr. X are going to abound.

Personally, I don't like the SITEPAL system, as the heads are animations...the text to speech is not user friendly....and they do not compare to what is available on the market from companies such as websitetalkingheads.com who supply full bodied live announcers (not animated figures) who walk onto a web site screen and start talking. Very effective.

Best part is that these live spokespeople deliver a very professional announcement and you can choose from a variety of talent. It costs a bit more to have one of these talking spokespeople appear on your web site, but in my opnion there is no comparison as to the effectiveness of the presentation.

The other nice thing is that you would not have any of the technical problems to cope with using talking spokepeople from websitetalkingheads.com or other companies providing this, as the talking spokespeople
reside on your server and not the server of the producer....you buy it...you own it...you place it on your server....and you pay no monthly or click through fees.

Not saying that SITEPAL is not a good value or service...but we did investigate the claims of Mr. X, and they are valid in our opinion. So if you are a web hoster or other party who will be placing Sitepal Talking heads on multiple sites.....give some thought to what might occur if you cannot get quick service when the system goes down.

From The Desk Of The Editor

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