Show HN: Listen to any web article in your podcast player

Show HN: Listen to any web article in your podcast player(audiblogs.com)

30 points by votick 5 years ago | 19 comments

I just tried it on https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

* I love the voice quality. Sounds natural. What generates this?

* It seems to have started playing mid-way through my test article, from "When should one review?", so it missed 60% of the text, including the header of that section.

edunteman 5 years ago |

Yeah I used this a week ago and was surprised by how much I liked it. It was a very pleasant onboarding, and the one click chrome extension to send to podcast was pretty magical.

I'm not a frequent web article reader, so I'm not a perfect user, but I can see how this can fill in for those moments where I do come across a dense text and think "goddamn I don't want to sit here and read all this right in the middle of my workday".

Have you considered a youtube audio extraction extension? I personally prefer videos over articles when it comes to learning about things, and most of the time I'll tuck my phone in my pocket and just listen to the audio. Seems kinda similar.

Either way, good luck, I see something like this working. Passive audio is just more convenient than dedicated article/video consumption time.

votick 5 years ago | |

we actually work on youtube already! If you go to youtube and click the extension, we convert the video to audio :)

m-localhost 5 years ago | | |

I'm using Huffduffer for a while and it's really good, since I can create a podcast feed from any available audio on the web and it extracts audio from several (video) platforms and stores it for a month.

> Huffduffer takes the pain out of podcasting found sounds.

https://huffduffer.com/about

The website is a bit dated but overall it works well with a bookmarklet.

edunteman 5 years ago | | |

http://gph.is/2cpbE6Y

shog 5 years ago |

It works very well, nice job! I like it.

One idea/question, is there a way to add to the feed via an external URL, rather then exclusively within the Chrome plugin?

I would use it even more if I wasn't constrained to chrome.

For example, adding this little snippet as a bookmark would for certain work from Firefox and iOS/Safari, and quite possibly others.

If I could get it molded to work with your service I'd be pretty stoked.

  javascript:void(location.href='https://audiblogs.com/add/?action=save&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href))

jazz3020 5 years ago | |

Yo, thanks for that idea. We will figure out a way to add something like that in a couple of days. We have an iOS app in TestFlight if you wanna give it a go. https://testflight.apple.com/join/qrGhAVUC

rayrag 5 years ago |

Looks nice but your website lacks any information about you and I have problem with trusting "faceless" websites. You should provide some info about who's behind this project. I understand that you might want protect your privacy but at the same time potential users deserve some background info.

jazz3020 5 years ago | |

Hey! Cofounder Eric here. I 100% agree. We will get some info about us on our site in a bit.

For now, here's some quick info about us. We're just two hackers living in San Francisco.

Kyle's quitting his job at Cruise Automation in a few days (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylejohnmorris/).

I've never had an actual job before haha. I've just been messing around building stuff (https://www.linkedin.com/in/automationist/)

Did you build Beaker Browser? Would love to get connected.

rayrag 5 years ago | | |

Thanks for the info, Eric. No I haven't build Beaker Browser, I just posted it here. Good luck with your project :)

mcarrica 5 years ago |

This is an awesome tool - when through my reading list backlog in less than a week by listening in the gym!

Go AudiBlogs!

m-localhost 5 years ago |

This is perfect. I love that it fits seamless in my audio/podcast flow. I was listening to articles via Pocket before, but it's not as good as your product.

I suspect this will cost money sooner or later (text2speech and audio storage) - what are the plans here?

votick 5 years ago | |

Honestly we don't have plans around making $ figured out. It started as a side project, and I feel the first step is to figure out if we built something valuable. If there's significant demand, we'll think of ways to monetize.

Could you elaborate on whats missing from Pocket? And 2) Is there anything on your mind we could add to make audiblogs 10x better for you?

m-localhost 5 years ago | | |

I just love how natural the voice sounds (don't even need other voices) and that it shows up in my podcast player so I don't have to switch to another app.

The voices in pocket are not as good I think.

I guess what's missing in the podcast feed, is a direct link to the source article. But else, it's perfect.

Thank you!

Mockapapella 5 years ago |

yyyep that's definitely something I'm gonna be using a lot of from now on. Searched for something like this a year or so back but didn't find anything that was good enough. Would really like a firefox version of the extension. Nice work OP

votick 5 years ago | |

What were the main things that weren't good enough? We can keep improving on them now.

And def thinking about firefox support, thanks for the input.

arn4v 5 years ago |

Love this! I have been looking for something like this since forever but I didn't think it could be this good! Great job

derekpankaew 5 years ago |

I've been using this almost every day for the last month. I try not to read any article the moment I see it now, and instead just send it to my podcast player.

jazz3020 5 years ago | |

Sweet! And yeah, I basically "listen later" most of my articles now too