Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
listenlater.fm
Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#2This is a very interesting idea, but unfortunately I seriously couldn't listen to that robot voice for more than a couple minutes at a time.
I read recently about big advances in AI speech production. I assume that is all still proprietary?
(And note, the voice is not bad compared to what computer speech synthesis used to be. I went back and listened again and was quite surprised by some human-like intonations. But, again, I couldn't listen to an article that would be longer than a minute or two.)
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#3Ohh, I was really excited when I first read the page:
I thought that maybe listenlater.fm would record a high-quality reading from the most sent-in articles a day (do things that don't scale).
However, it apparently uses text-to-speech :/
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#4If I understand correctly, Pocket supports the same TTS functionality while also being a convenient traditional read-it-later service.
https://help.getpocket.com/article/1081-listening-to-article...
Edit: Oh, this new service provides value in that it generates a custom podcast feed using the articles, which you then subscribe to.
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#5The robotic voice is unfortunately a dealbreaker.
I currently use https://read2me.online/ which uses the ML TTS voices from one of the big cloud providers....Google (I think). I then have a custom RSS file hosted on an S3 bucket.
I hand crank the whole system when there's something new I want to listen to
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#6I can see this is very useful when I don’t have time to read when driving or don’t want to use my eyes after work. The elephant in the room is how do you cope with articles behind paywall?
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#7I can see this is very useful when I don’t have time to read when driving or don’t want to use my eyes after work. The elephant in the room is how do you cope with articles behind paywall?
So I just added a feature last night as this was blowing up on Reddit that lets you paste text into a form. It’s a little less convenient at the moment. But I’d like to improve the process of sending it arbitrary text.
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#8I like stuff like this but am always ruined by the text-to-speech engines. I just can’t do it.
For people who want a curated selection of high-quality articles read by best of breed narrators, check out Audm [1]. It isn’t going to be be on-demand or cover everything that one would want, but the source material is quite good (The Atlantic, New York Times, ProPublica, the New Yorker, Wired, etc.) and the narration is notable because most of the roster are well-known audiobook readers, which is different from similar services or even the stuff Apple is doing with Apple News+. For me, I’ve found that not only does having a human narrator make a huge difference, but having a good reader is a game changer. I’ve been a subscriber for a few years and it’s one of the most high-value subscriptions I have.
I read a lot — at least four or five books a month and hundreds of pages of blogs, magazines, scientific papers, etc. — but I really do like to listen to books or news when I have the chance. I can read about twice as fast as I can listen, but it isn’t always ideal.
[1]: https://audm.com
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#9For some reason, I can happily listen to robotic voices for a very long period of time. I have listened to several books that way, when there isn't a good narrated version.
In fact, apart from a few quirks (a pause at the "." of Mr. for instance), the iOS TTS engine sounds almost pleasant to me. It's no where near a good narrator, of course, but good enough if there is no poetic value in the words.
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#10The robotic voice is unfortunately a dealbreaker. I currently use https://read2me.online/ which uses the ML TTS voices from one of the big cloud providers....Google (I think). I then have a custom RSS file hosted on an S3 bucket. I hand crank the whole system when there's something new I want to listen to
> I currently use https://read2me.online/
Doesn't seem to be working. Putting a link returns "Bad request"; uploading a .txt file returns "Bad referrer/request type".