Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears • Hacker News Board

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#21

Post by petercooper » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #18

petercooper wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it seems to be using AWS Polly's "standard" Joanna voice. However, you can also use "neural" voices (basically enhanced with ML) which sound somewhat better. Here's Joanna in neural mode: http://no.gd/voice2.mp3 .. and here's a British female voice which sounds pretty good: http://no.gd/voice1.mp3 Neural voices are 4x the price of standard ones though! Standard is $4 per 1 million characters, neural is $16. https:…

I really wish I could use the Neural voices on this, but at $4 per million characters, I'm just beyond breaking even. Since this is a self-funded side project, I can't run at a loss, and I don't think you can reasonably charge more for the kind of service ListenLater.fm provides, but I'm really excited about the prices coming down in this area. For what it's worth, Google, Amazon, and basically everywhere else I've l…

I've played with Polly a fair bit but at very low scale and, to be honest, I hadn't even noticed the price difference till today. It's amazing how vast it is and I can see why you've gone the way you have.

It probably pays to get a foot in the door with this idea now because if the prices do eventually collapse (or, better, high quality open source TTS makes huge advances) you'll be well positioned to take advantage of it.

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#22

Post by visarga » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

For me, reading and listening to the text at the same time doubles the focus.

I use the Alex voice on my MacBook with a bookmarklet script to both read any web page and highlight text as it is being read. Special integrations for reddit and HN to skip reading user names and chrome. I used to have a version of this script work in PDF files as well, but recently that route has been closed. A nice UX feature is to trigger reading by clicking on the desired word, so you can easily pause and resume.

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#23

Post by FemmeAndroid » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

tethys wrote: post #12

This looks like it is made by the same people behind Huffduffer [0]? Which is an absolutely amazing service I've been using for years: Just throw any audio file against it, and it will add it to a personal podcast feed. [0] https://huffduffer.com/

It is not. Sorry, I really love Jeremy Keith’s design sensibility. But I think I might need to change it up a bit more if there’s any confusion.

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#24

Post by switz » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #18

petercooper wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it seems to be using AWS Polly's "standard" Joanna voice. However, you can also use "neural" voices (basically enhanced with ML) which sound somewhat better. Here's Joanna in neural mode: http://no.gd/voice2.mp3 .. and here's a British female voice which sounds pretty good: http://no.gd/voice1.mp3 Neural voices are 4x the price of standard ones though! Standard is $4 per 1 million characters, neural is $16. https:…

I really wish I could use the Neural voices on this, but at $4 per million characters, I'm just beyond breaking even. Since this is a self-funded side project, I can't run at a loss, and I don't think you can reasonably charge more for the kind of service ListenLater.fm provides, but I'm really excited about the prices coming down in this area. For what it's worth, Google, Amazon, and basically everywhere else I've l…

I'd offer a more expensive version with the neural options available. Maybe offer a monthly subscription so people can give it a try with a smaller commitment. Just because you might not think that it's worth it, doesn't mean other people won't have different value propositions.

I have friends and family who would easily pay $100+/year to use this (compared to the $36/year you're charging now). The British neural option above is much more palatable than the current default, imo.

All in all, nice work!

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#25

Post by FemmeAndroid » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

switz wrote: post #24

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish I could use the Neural voices on this, but at $4 per million characters, I'm just beyond breaking even. Since this is a self-funded side project, I can't run at a loss, and I don't think you can reasonably charge more for the kind of service ListenLater.fm provides, but I'm really excited about the prices coming down in this area. For what it's worth, Google, Amazon, and basically everywhere else I've l…

I'd offer a more expensive version with the neural options available. Maybe offer a monthly subscription so people can give it a try with a smaller commitment. Just because you might not think that it's worth it, doesn't mean other people won't have different value propositions. I have friends and family who would easily pay $100+/year to use this (compared to the $36/year you're charging now). The British neural opt…

I’ll keep it in mind. I’ve yet to talk to someone willing to pay $100+/year to get that voice, but if they’re out there, I’d be happy to offer the higher quality voice options.

For anyone interested in this, send me an email at femme@femmeandroid.com saying you’d like to hear when I release the higher quality voices at a higher price.

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#26

Post by pmuench » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

switz wrote: post #24

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish I could use the Neural voices on this, but at $4 per million characters, I'm just beyond breaking even. Since this is a self-funded side project, I can't run at a loss, and I don't think you can reasonably charge more for the kind of service ListenLater.fm provides, but I'm really excited about the prices coming down in this area. For what it's worth, Google, Amazon, and basically everywhere else I've l…

I'd offer a more expensive version with the neural options available. Maybe offer a monthly subscription so people can give it a try with a smaller commitment. Just because you might not think that it's worth it, doesn't mean other people won't have different value propositions. I have friends and family who would easily pay $100+/year to use this (compared to the $36/year you're charging now). The British neural opt…

+1 on this, would happy to pay more for a better voice. Currently it’s similar to what I get with Instapaper, so I don’t know if I would make a switch. But if the voice is better then I would like to use Listenlater!

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#27

Post by Mortiffer » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

lit, earlier today i needed to do shopping which I hate so i wanted to listen to some of the articles my friends have been sending me and I have not responded because they are too long but of course mobile text to speech extensions inside android where not working well and even the goolge assistant was a pain in the ass to setup and then didn't work.

So yea thanks for making this went for premium right away I assume its good but in general want to support audio based products :)

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#28

Post by Mortiffer » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

powersnail wrote: post #9

For 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.

on android I use evie it lets you choose different speech engines pretty good https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lenntt.evo...

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#29

Post by royosherove » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #18

petercooper wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it seems to be using AWS Polly's "standard" Joanna voice. However, you can also use "neural" voices (basically enhanced with ML) which sound somewhat better. Here's Joanna in neural mode: http://no.gd/voice2.mp3 .. and here's a British female voice which sounds pretty good: http://no.gd/voice1.mp3 Neural voices are 4x the price of standard ones though! Standard is $4 per 1 million characters, neural is $16. https:…

I really wish I could use the Neural voices on this, but at $4 per million characters, I'm just beyond breaking even. Since this is a self-funded side project, I can't run at a loss, and I don't think you can reasonably charge more for the kind of service ListenLater.fm provides, but I'm really excited about the prices coming down in this area. For what it's worth, Google, Amazon, and basically everywhere else I've l…

I'd pay extra $5 per month for a better voice.

Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears

#30

Post by sdepablos » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #18

petercooper wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it seems to be using AWS Polly's "standard" Joanna voice. However, you can also use "neural" voices (basically enhanced with ML) which sound somewhat better. Here's Joanna in neural mode: http://no.gd/voice2.mp3 .. and here's a British female voice which sounds pretty good: http://no.gd/voice1.mp3 Neural voices are 4x the price of standard ones though! Standard is $4 per 1 million characters, neural is $16. https:…

I really wish I could use the Neural voices on this, but at $4 per million characters, I'm just beyond breaking even. Since this is a self-funded side project, I can't run at a loss, and I don't think you can reasonably charge more for the kind of service ListenLater.fm provides, but I'm really excited about the prices coming down in this area. For what it's worth, Google, Amazon, and basically everywhere else I've l…

Not my field of expertise, but seeing that generating the voice is one of the biggest costs, have you think about generating it yourself with something like https://github.com/mozilla/TTS running the process in commodity hardware?