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Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to

soundgecko.com

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Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to

#81

Post by hnoob »

petercooper wrote: post #5

I'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…

Does tldr.io provide an RSS feed? If so, just plug it into podcastomatic.com (RSS-to-TTS-podcast) and presto; you have a tldr-podcast.

Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to

#83

Post by plasma »

yitchelle wrote: post #54

Great concept. One suggestion off the top of my head is to allow for offline listening. Ie, configure soundgecko to get a snapshort of HN front page at say 5pm, TTS the front page contents, email the sound file as an attachment for listening. This would be extremely useful for areas that has low mobile phone signal, or countries data plans are expensive or/and restrictive. (looking at you Australia!)

We (SoundGecko team) are based in Australia :)

Definitely going down this path in terms of offline support.

Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to

#84

Post by dvoiss »

Nice job! Just the other day I was thinking about how great it would be to have a voice-read readability (http://readability.com/).

* Is there any way to go to the listing on HN? (I like to check comments occasionally).

* When clicking "View original article" it takes me to a separate page where the article is read and there's a new button to visit the original article. When I click the new button it loads the article in the frame. Is there any way all this can be collapsed to just one step? (I click it the first time, it goes to the separate page and already has the article loaded).

* It would be really interesting to have a bookmarklet for this like with readability.

Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to

#85

Post by goostavos »

This is absolutely fantastic! I occasionally have to make 2+ hour commutes to/from jobs, and I've long been wanting a way to digest the latest tech news while driving down the road.

Plus, I never have the forethought or, the desire to sift through the various pod casts and guess at which would I would like or find interesting, so being able to 'tune' into the front page seems like an excellent way to pass the time.

Excellent work, man. You've literally built the exact thing I've been wanting for a long time.

Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to

#86

Post by miket »

longzheng wrote: post #2

I 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…

Keep up the great work longzheng! You guys rock.

Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to

#87

Post by saturdaysaint »

charlesju wrote: post #71
hnriot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio is the worse way to consume content, why not just use Evernote or whatever and read what you've missed? Then you can continue to listen to music and catch up with what you've missed while you're on the train.

I actually find that Audio is my favorite way to consume content because I usually want to use my sight and hands to be doing something more proactive and creative (ie. programming) Perhaps this is unique to myself, but I have found that I can function amazingly well digesting something through Audio and working on something visually. I have no formal neuroscience education, but perhaps it's something to do with how…

As an audiobook fanatic, my go to explanation for audio's effectiveness is that speaking and listening were the human race's primary way of transmitting and receiving information until very recently - the era of most of the human race being literate is a blink in the scale of evolutionary history.

A recent article on audiobooks (in the New Yorker, I think?) cited studies saying that audiobook readers had markedly better recall of physical descriptions in books, presumably because the visual processing centers of the brain aren't occupied with the task of reading itself.

Re: Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to

#88

Post by BinaryBullet »

dvoiss wrote: post #84

Nice job! Just the other day I was thinking about how great it would be to have a voice-read readability ( http://readability.com/ ). * Is there any way to go to the listing on HN? (I like to check comments occasionally). * When clicking "View original article" it takes me to a separate page where the article is read and there's a new button to visit the original article. When I click the new button it loads the arti…

I created a bookmarklet the other day. It doesn't work on all links, but I just tested it on a CNN article, and it worked.

Anyways, here it is (YMMV):

https://gist.github.com/4596293

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