We are Cristina, Maria, Radu and Alex, co-founders of Listle (https://www.listle.io). We provide audio versions of articles. Instead of sitting in front of your computer reading your favourite blogs or news articles, you can listen to them while you commute, run or cook.
While being in YC over the last three months, we’ve developed both the iOS and Android apps. You can find these here: https://listle.app.link/m2DbuzvEDZ.
We started this out while still being in university, back in London, a few months ago. The idea was born as a solution to the painful process of using crappy text-to-speech software to listen to articles on the commute to lectures. We used Instapaper, Pocket and open source solutions for text to speech, but none were great. We noticed that as much as technology has evolved, listening to a robotic voice for more than five minutes is still simply terrible.
The success of podcasts and audiobooks shows that people enjoy listening to content. However, most of the content out there is still in written format. Listle aims to bridge the gap between these two worlds and enable people to listen to any article on the Internet. For example, you can listen to Paul Graham’s, Michael Seibel’s and several other YC partners’ articles. We’re also actively partnering with independent authors and enabling them to distribute their content in audio, through an embedded player on their Medium page / personal blog. Find examples of what this looks like here, https://medium.com/hackernoon/wtf-is-the-blockchain-1da89ba1..., https://medium.com/the-mission/your-college-degree-is-worthl... and here, https://medium.com/skilluped/the-3-most-important-skills-to-....
Every morning we release top new audio articles from that day — curated from HN and Reddit, all read by humans. We realise people have different preferences. Because of that, we’ve included a “request” feature within the app. For any article that you find intriguing, you can copy / paste the link into the app and get a top-notch AI narration, instantly.
We’re very excited about this and really hope you give it a try. We’re eager to hear any thoughts / suggestions / requests!