Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio • Hacker News Board

Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#1

Post by christianpbrink » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:00 PM UTC

Hi HN! We are Christian and Ryan (rtw2101) of Audm (https://www.audm.com/ and https://appstore.com/audm/audm). Audm is an iPhone app that lets you listen to the best longform (3000 words or longer) magazine articles from titles including The Atlantic, Wired (plus Backchannel), Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Foreign Policy, Outside, The New York Review of Books, and a bunch of others.

We were big podcast fans, but we knew that most of the world’s best storytellers write for top-tier magazines. We also love audiobooks (when they’re read by really gifted narrators), so we knew that stories written for print often work well in audio. So we built Audm.

We release most stories in the app at the same moment they hit the magazines’ websites. Right now we produce 5-8 articles (3-5 hours of audio) per week, and that number is growing fast as we onboard more publications. Our subscribers seem to have an insatiable appetite.

Something that we didn’t fully appreciate when we started (although our users did) is just how skilled a narrator has to be if they’re going to sound good reading articles that are dense with information and nuanced ideas (which often means very complex sentence structure). We’ve become extremely opinionated about narrators.

We’d love your feedback!

Thanks all, Ryan and Christian

Re: Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#2

Post by dr_ » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

I never really used to listen to podcasts - until I got a car that has Car Play functionality. Now I listen to them all the time. Will Audm be available on Apple Car Play or Android Auto?

Re: Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#3

Post by christianpbrink » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:28 PM UTC

dr_ wrote: post #2

I never really used to listen to podcasts - until I got a car that has Car Play functionality. Now I listen to them all the time. Will Audm be available on Apple Car Play or Android Auto?

Definitely -- both are in the works. We think the car's an awesome place to listen.

Re: Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#4

Post by virgil_disgr4ce » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

This is cool—I've definitely been wanting this. I've tried many times to use iOS's accessibility features to read me an article on Pocket and... well.... you know. That didn't exactly stick ;)

I'm curious—how many narrators do you employ so far? This is such an interesting business.

Re: Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#5

Post by christianpbrink » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:32 PM UTC

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #4

This is cool—I've definitely been wanting this. I've tried many times to use iOS's accessibility features to read me an article on Pocket and... well.... you know. That didn't exactly stick ;) I'm curious—how many narrators do you employ so far? This is such an interesting business.

Other apps' read-aloud features make good temporary solutions, but sophisticated content really needs to be handled by the best narrators.

Our current core roster includes a dozen narrators.

Re: Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#6

Post by danenania » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:39 PM UTC

I love this. There are many situations where audio is preferable to text -- driving, walking between trains on a commute, or even just lying in bed and giving your eyes a break from screens. This seems like it has the potential to vastly increase the number of quality audio options available.

Are there any plans to add high quality tech content to the mix? It would be great to occasionally take in a long article from Medium or highscalability or... lots of other sources in audio form. I suppose a challenge there would be how to read out code snippets in a digestible way.

Re: Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#7

Post by christianpbrink » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:49 PM UTC

danenania wrote: post #6

I love this. There are many situations where audio is preferable to text -- driving, walking between trains on a commute, or even just lying in bed and giving your eyes a break from screens. This seems like it has the potential to vastly increase the number of quality audio options available. Are there any plans to add high quality tech content to the mix? It would be great to occasionally take in a long article from…

Great observation about how to narrate code snippets. None of our narrators are technical (as far as we know!), but part of our job is to provide a narrator with a script describing the way they should narrate any text (or non-text figure) whose spoken equivalent isn't obvious. One recent example of this, a little different from the code example, involved 64-character hashes. You want to convey the palpable sense of randomness that one experiences looking at a hash string, but you also can't force your audience to listen as all 64 characters are read aloud.

Of course, even if we provide the best narration imaginable, it's not obvious that many articles about code would be valuable in audio form. Some things you just need to stare at for a while.

All this said, we're definitely into doing more tech content. It just has to be very well-written. Unfortunately, just as in any other content vertical, most tech content just... isn't.

Re: Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#8

Post by JonAtkinson » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:24 PM UTC

I love the sound of this and have subscribed - an intersection of quality journalism and podcasting is a fantastic concept.

Do you have any plans to provide an Alexa skill? "Alexa, read me something interesting" is a service I would pay handsomely for.

Re: Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#9

Post by christianpbrink » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

JonAtkinson wrote: post #8

I love the sound of this and have subscribed - an intersection of quality journalism and podcasting is a fantastic concept. Do you have any plans to provide an Alexa skill? "Alexa, read me something interesting" is a service I would pay handsomely for.

Awesome :D

Great question about voice. Yes, we do have plans for Alexa etc. We're really excited about that.

Re: Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

#10

Post by totally » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:56 PM UTC

Instapaper reads me long-form articles on my commute (iOS).

I heard about audm on some podcast, I forget where. I checked it out, and decided it wasn't worth $8 a month to have a human read to me, instead of a robot, a small subset of the content I regularly consume.

Robot-for-free over human-for-pay seems like an apt analogy for our time.

At any rate, I like trials, and if your service is truly great and had the value-add of curating excellent articles from sources I wouldn't normally find, that might put me over the edge. Then again, I cancelled my Audible subscription too.

If you're successful, Amazon surely will buy you.