Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
1–10 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
#2I find I don't have enough time to read all the stuff on Hacker News, but I spend heaps of time on the train where I’m usually listening to music.
Since I work at a startup doing some stuff with text-to-speech, I hacked together this text-to-speech "radio station" so I can listen to Hacker News on my mobile instead of music.
It uses native HTML5 audio that worked fine with iOS and Android in my testing (though some OEMs like HTC screw up the player skin), and uses the RSS feed to grab top articles. Obviously TTS isn’t perfect, but I find most articles except coding ones are comprehensible.
Let me know of any suggestions.
Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
#3I find I don't have enough time to read all the stuff on Hacker News, but I spend heaps of time on the train where I’m usually listening to music. Since I work at a startup doing some stuff with text-to-speech, I hacked together this text-to-speech "radio station" so I can listen to Hacker News on my mobile instead of music. It uses native HTML5 audio that worked fine with iOS and Android in my testing (though some O…
Is the audio streamed over cellular? It would be cool to preload clips over WiFi before hitting the road.
Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
#4I find I don't have enough time to read all the stuff on Hacker News, but I spend heaps of time on the train where I’m usually listening to music. Since I work at a startup doing some stuff with text-to-speech, I hacked together this text-to-speech "radio station" so I can listen to Hacker News on my mobile instead of music. It uses native HTML5 audio that worked fine with iOS and Android in my testing (though some O…
Is the audio streamed over cellular? It would be cool to preload clips over WiFi before hitting the road.
Yeah unfortunately there isn't a lot of control over HTML5 audio AFAIK. There is a preload option but it's specific to the individual element.
Maybe as a hack I could change it so each article has a hidden somewhere that preloads it in the background, then when you actually play back it should use cache.
I don't know if that's wise over a cell connection though, downloading all the MP3s.
Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
#5I'm finding it hard to follow the TTS (but it's growing on me) but the core idea is superb and I'm catching interesting snippets. Changing the TTS voice between items is a genius idea I'd have never thought of myself but it really helps divide it up and keeps my attention.
A suggestion, perhaps, is to lean on tldr.io's system of providing well written short summaries of Hacker News items rather than the actual content. That way it'd sound a lot more like a regular news bulletin and skirt around problems of third party content. (I know one of the founders if you want an intro but I believe you can grab their stuff somehow anyway..)
Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
#6I'm finding it hard to follow the TTS (but it's growing on me) but the core idea is superb and I'm catching interesting snippets. Changing the TTS voice between items is a genius idea I'd have never thought of myself but it really helps divide it up and keeps my attention. A suggestion, perhaps, is to lean on tldr.io's system of providing well written short summaries of Hacker News items rather than the actual conten…
Yeah I came across tldr.io the other day and really like the concept. Would love an introduction.
PS: the codename of the backend that powers all this is actually "tldr" since I can't be stuffed reading :)
Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
#7Wow, amazing work. I too was skeptical about TTS but it really grows on you.
Are you guys using some kind of proprietary solution? Sounds really clear.
Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
#8It's down. Does anyone have a cached version or short TL;DR what i am missing out ?
Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
#9It's down. Does anyone have a cached version or short TL;DR what i am missing out ?
Seems to be up for me still.
Basically it reads text to speech of each article on the front page of HN. Kinda like Hacker News Radio almost.
Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to
#10Wow, amazing work. I too was skeptical about TTS but it really grows on you. Are you guys using some kind of proprietary solution? Sounds really clear.
Glad you're pleasantly surprised. You'll probably come across a few oddities sooner or later.
My startup has licensed some premium text-to-speech engines for a pretty penny so you get what you pay for!