Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#11

Post by pramodbiligiri » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:04 AM UTC

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #8

pramodbiligiri wrote: post #2

Hi all, I'm the original poster. I felt encouraged to do a Show HN for Paper Time after seeing positive feedback in a different, side projects related thread a few days back [1]. I'll be around for a while so go ahead and ask me any questions, either around the idea or the technical parts. A big shout out to the folks on HN who responded with very pertinent resources about UI design a few months back [2], when I'd ju…

Nice, looks great! Could you give any thoughts on which of those resources in [2] were particularly useful for you? I have a similar backend background and interest in learning about UI design! BTW a small issue but opening and closing your FAQ modal seems to be pushing URL history - which means you have to hit back repeatedly to exit the page if you interact with it. It doesn’t look like having the modal open and th…

Refactoring UI was a great resource that was recommended on that Ask HN. The authors have a book and some videos. Very actionable and systematic advice. That formed the basis of my understanding.

For more specific techniques, the Learning Web Design 5th Edition (by Jenna Something) is very good.

I skimmed Don’t Make Me Think, which validated some of my own thoughts and helps you avoid silly oversights. I also read Design of Everyday Things but found it very lengthy and somewhat pompous. Not sure that I got much out of it.

On that page someone has linked to a bunch of MIT material. I didn’t check that out in detail. Might be good... I don’t know.

Thanks for the bug report on the modal. Would have never noticed as I navigate to my site directly and never click the Back button there.

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#12

Post by bArray » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 10:52 AM UTC

pramodbiligiri wrote: post #10

bArray wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great work! Some other feature recommendations: 1. A daily RSS feed - perhaps it could compile them into a 'single' podcast. 2. Human voice uploads - allow readers to upload their own voice (would require moderation - but would solve most pronunciation issues caused by TTS). You could randomly assign some number of articles to each moderator to read. Again, great work - this has given me some ideas!

Thanks! Daily RSS feed sounds like a good idea. RSS used to have the concept of media enclosures or something. Perhaps if I can embed the audio into that, people can listen right there? On the other hand, that will have fewer people visiting the website :D Heh. 2. My somewhat long term product idea is to let the paper submitters volunteer to read out their abstracts, if they choose. But some amount of automated TTS w…

> RSS used to have the concept of media enclosures or something.

Yes, and 'show notes'. What you can do in theory is embed advertising there, or in the audio itself if you need to monetize.

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#13

Post by LoveMortuus » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 11:53 AM UTC

pramodbiligiri wrote: post #2

Hi all, I'm the original poster. I felt encouraged to do a Show HN for Paper Time after seeing positive feedback in a different, side projects related thread a few days back [1]. I'll be around for a while so go ahead and ask me any questions, either around the idea or the technical parts. A big shout out to the folks on HN who responded with very pertinent resources about UI design a few months back [2], when I'd ju…

How come there are no Biology or Chemistry topics to choose?

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#14

Post by user_agent » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 12:05 PM UTC

@pramodbiligiri, would you be willing to share a little bit more about how the thext-to-speech is utlized in your project?

What provider do you use, the costs related to it, is it a real-time text processing, or maybe you have a bulk processing routine, opinions on different TTS providers? You know, things like that for everyone who'd like to try TTS in their projects.

(We're talking about >3000 abstracts TTS-ed on the author's page, and that's not a trivial amount if one is for instance using external providers for the job).

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#15

Post by pramodbiligiri » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

LoveMortuus wrote: post #13

pramodbiligiri wrote: post #2

Hi all, I'm the original poster. I felt encouraged to do a Show HN for Paper Time after seeing positive feedback in a different, side projects related thread a few days back [1]. I'll be around for a while so go ahead and ask me any questions, either around the idea or the technical parts. A big shout out to the folks on HN who responded with very pertinent resources about UI design a few months back [2], when I'd ju…

How come there are no Biology or Chemistry topics to choose?

Hi LoveMortuus, I have started off with CS papers only, and that too only a small subset of that (that’s why the website’s tag line says CS Research). May come around to adding more in due course. Is BioArxiv a good source of papers?

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#16

Post by pramodbiligiri » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

user_agent wrote: post #14

@pramodbiligiri, would you be willing to share a little bit more about how the thext-to-speech is utlized in your project? What provider do you use, the costs related to it, is it a real-time text processing, or maybe you have a bulk processing routine, opinions on different TTS providers? You know, things like that for everyone who'd like to try TTS in their projects. (We're talking about >3000 abstracts TTS-ed on t…

Sure, it's not exactly rocket science. I'm using Google Cloud's Text-To-Speech - https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech. You should be able to find the pricing details there. I'm guessing other cloud providers' TTS would be comparable as well? I haven't checked.

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#17

Post by RandomThrow321 » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

This is a great idea, thanks OP.

I've been wanting to cultivate a habit of reading a relevant paper (or abstract) at some cadence, such as once a week. Can anyone recommend a way to find the important and/or influential papers in a given field? Maybe something similar to The Morning Paper.

Edit: thanks everyone for the great suggestions!

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#18

Post by heldsteel7 » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

Great idea! How do you choose papers? Is it all free??

Would be good if you could further narrow down from the topic to subtopics.

A small glitch, when I deselect 'Select All' it doesn't clear topics.

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#19

Post by Valdy » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 2:05 PM UTC

There are a lot of AI narrator services you can use to create and record custom podcast. There is one called narrationbox which I specially use to create Audio Books from ebooks. You can use it to record custom podcasts as well.

Re: Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

#20

Post by pramodbiligiri » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

Valdy wrote: post #19

There are a lot of AI narrator services you can use to create and record custom podcast. There is one called narrationbox which I specially use to create Audio Books from ebooks. You can use it to record custom podcasts as well.

Wow, that’s neat. I hadn’t heard of narrationbox.

I’m also seeing a bit of what look like private podcasts taking off. It’s probably a matter of time at this point.