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Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

websitevoice.com

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Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#31

Post by rapnie »

SeaDude wrote: post #15

Hello, Very interesting. I've been using Edge's built-in voice reading a lot more recently for the exact case you mention on your homepage: listening while working. I have two questions for you after reading your TOS and Privacy Policy. I was expecting to see "you" scraping data from each site or otherwise monetizing the service, but nothing stood out. Either your TOS/PP is incorrect, or you don't have an obvious inc…

Good to see others checking TOS/PP too, and asking these questions. Especially as there is absolutely no transparency. Who is the company, or some people behind this, contact email? The TOS says 'use at own risk, we are not liable for anything' and also mentions 'Refund policy' (?).

The domain is namecheap, no more info. And the HN user tiburon is a new account.

There are 4 trackers on the site. Besides GTM (mentioned in PP) there is twitter-ads.

Do you have more info, tiburon?

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#32

Post by chrismorgan »

tiburon wrote: post #27
SeaDude wrote: post #15

Hello, Very interesting. I've been using Edge's built-in voice reading a lot more recently for the exact case you mention on your homepage: listening while working. I have two questions for you after reading your TOS and Privacy Policy. I was expecting to see "you" scraping data from each site or otherwise monetizing the service, but nothing stood out. Either your TOS/PP is incorrect, or you don't have an obvious inc…

why it really matters on who I am? I'm a developer with passion to help people listen to podcasts and the idea was simple. How can I offer it for free? I do a lot of work to make it happen, there will be a premium version with more features which are being cooked with the help of many developers who loved the idea too.

Given the purpose “to help people listen to podcasts”, I’m a bit puzzled about which end you’re tackling it from. Does it not make more sense to work on the user’s side, on browser software, where you can make all sites work, rather than helping the odd site here or there to support this? When approached from the website side, I don’t expect many to adopt it.

(On the browser side, I am aware that various browsers have speech controls hooked up, most commonly inside a Reader Mode—to say nothing of screen readers, which have a different target market. There’s also the Web Speech API which could be used to replicate WebsiteVoice’s functionality using whatever voices are offered by the user’s device. Its quality will be heavily platform-dependent.)

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#33

Post by yorwba »

tiburon wrote: post #4
baroffoos wrote: post #2

Don't have time to test it now. How does it sound? Is it better than the robotic text to speech voice we all know? Wonder if you can run this offline so you can save the files when you build your static site and no scripts are required on the frontend.

It's certainly better than most TTS out there. We are developing AI in-house to make it as humanly sound as possible. There's always improvement need to be made, but we're getting there :) Your latter suggestion is definitely worth something to look at. Let me know once you've tested it out. We highly appreciate any feedback. Cheers!

I'm curious how the economics work out with building your own TTS vs. just paying Google to do it for you. Of course Google's TTS API costs money, but I assume that you also had to pay for a dataset of transcribed speech. After how many hours of audio is the breakeven point?

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#34

Post by rosha »

tiburon wrote: post #26

I'm not here to pitch the idea to make people like it, if you do not like it, be constructive on a given problem. To get a feeling more on how it feels on a blog here is an example: https://websitevoice.com/blog/text-to-speech-dyslexia-and-re... if the solution does not appeal to you, it surely appeals to others.

@tiburon thanks for the feature, i truly love it. i've added it to my blog with the JS snippet and it plays now on all the articles! https://jaywad.com/blogs/tips-for-a-productive-morning-routi...

I would wish to be able to customise the play button though.

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#35

Post by rapnie »

tiburon wrote: post #27
SeaDude wrote: post #15

Hello, Very interesting. I've been using Edge's built-in voice reading a lot more recently for the exact case you mention on your homepage: listening while working. I have two questions for you after reading your TOS and Privacy Policy. I was expecting to see "you" scraping data from each site or otherwise monetizing the service, but nothing stood out. Either your TOS/PP is incorrect, or you don't have an obvious inc…

why it really matters on who I am? I'm a developer with passion to help people listen to podcasts and the idea was simple. How can I offer it for free? I do a lot of work to make it happen, there will be a premium version with more features which are being cooked with the help of many developers who loved the idea too.

Ah, I just missed this comment when sending my reply.

Many people indeed do not care, and just use any cool service they encounter (and yours is cool, don't get me wrong).

An increasing body of people (including me) is more wary of just using any stuff that is out there on Wild West internet. And for good reasons.

In your comment you provide information that would be very valuable to have on your site.

E.g. 'I am a passionate developer and intend to provide Premium services eventually. The basic services you find here will continue to be free.'

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#37

Post by tiburon »

timClicks wrote: post #30
tiburon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why it really matters on who I am? I'm a developer with passion to help people listen to podcasts and the idea was simple. How can I offer it for free? I do a lot of work to make it happen, there will be a premium version with more features which are being cooked with the help of many developers who loved the idea too.

It matters because one of your potential customers thinks it matters. And presumably because services without a business model don't have a long future.

timClicks that is not true, there are many products out there that do not rely on capitals, It does not matter who I am personally. The service is free of charge until we cannot make it free of charge anymore for whatever reason. We are focusing now on user's feedbacks who already added the widget. you can find more answers on our business model there. https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/finished-mvp-to-turn-blog...

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#38

Post by lukeholder »

dbetteridge wrote: post #36

Constructive criticism , I could not find any samples of the audio on your site. Recommendation, add the plugin to your own homepage for potential users to test it out before having to signup.

There is a large 'try it now' button above the fold.

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#39

Post by tiburon »

dbetteridge wrote: post #36

Constructive criticism , I could not find any samples of the audio on your site. Recommendation, add the plugin to your own homepage for potential users to test it out before having to signup.

thanks for the input:

there is a demo button here on this page where you enable your website. You can even test the feature without signup.

https://websitevoice.com/convert-text-to-audio-free

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#40

Post by dbetteridge »

tiburon wrote: post #39
dbetteridge wrote: post #36

Constructive criticism , I could not find any samples of the audio on your site. Recommendation, add the plugin to your own homepage for potential users to test it out before having to signup.

thanks for the input: there is a demo button here on this page where you enable your website. You can even test the feature without signup. https://websitevoice.com/convert-text-to-audio-free

Apologies, looks like your widget domain is being blocked by my work and was preventing the demo button from doing anything.
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