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Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio
- baroffoos 8y agoDon't have time to test it now. How does it sound? Is it better than the robotic text to speech voice we all know? Wonder if you can run this offline so you can save the files when you build your static site and no scripts are required on the frontend.
- tiburon 8y agoIt's certainly better than most TTS out there. We are developing AI in-house to make it as humanly sound as possible. There's always improvement need to be made, but we're getting there :) Your latter suggestion is definitely worth something to look at. Let me know once you've tested it out. We highly appreciate any feedback. Cheers!
- yorwba 8y agoI'm curious how the economics work out with building your own TTS vs. just paying Google to do it for you. Of course Google's TTS API costs money, but I assume that you also had to pay for a dataset of transcribed speech. After how many hours of audio is the breakeven point?
- txtme 8y agoThe actual text to voice synthesis isn't acutally bad, but the audio quality is terrible. The audio artifacts are so bad I could barely listen to the demo snippets. It's too bad they ruined a quite good product by skimping on the most important quality, audio quality. I wonder how OP missed this? Audio quality has to be flawless when using headphones for extended times. It's not like you need a lot of bits for audio, so it's not something you save on. Please fix!
- mholt 8y agoSounds good on my speakers
- txtme 8y agoHeadphones.
- philtar 8y agoIt's fine on my phone and laptop. I think you are the one with the issue. I would delete my comments if I were you because you look like a jerk mentioning it 3 times in a post with 8 comments total. And it's not even true.
- polamam 8y agothe audio sounds good to me too even with headphones, are you sure you haven't got broken headphones?
- mindwork 8y agoLaurel or Yanny test?
- rosha 8y agoit sounds great for me too. you must have headphone issues.
- tiburon 8y agoWe created this free web app to convert articles to high-quality audio. Our mission is to help people with learning disabilities, those who prefer listening over reading, and who are always on the go to enjoy consuming your content online. Please give it a try and let us now what you think. Your feedback is highly appreciated :)
- txtme 8y agoThe audio is anything but high quality! Please use better compression settings.
- achairapart 8y agoSince it's free, I wonder why don't you make it available as a browser extension instead of asking publishers and content creators to manually embed your service.
- jamil7 8y agoI'm working on a project that overlaps slightly (only with this feature). Would you be open to offering programmatic access in the future via an API?.
- txtme 8y agoYou should showcase your product better. Add a text input box so that prospective users can try it themselves.
- voltagex_ 8y agoCan I use this to convert other articles? Could I pay to get 32kbit Opus?
- whyineedaccount 8y agoI'm curious, what is it opus? and what's the benefit of it?
- nzealand 8y agoI added it to an old unused part of my website. https://www.folj.com/lateral-solutions/ https://www.folj.com/lateral-solutions/ Apparently my javascript doesn't play nicely with programmatically injected elements. The Show All Solutions button still works.
- tiburon 8y agogood, at least you powered your blog with voice. happy to see it useful for you.
- SeaDude 8y agoHello, Very interesting. I've been using Edge's built-in voice reading a lot more recently for the exact case you mention on your homepage: listening while working. I have two questions for you after reading your TOS and Privacy Policy. I was expecting to see "you" scraping data from each site or otherwise monetizing the service, but nothing stood out. Either your TOS/PP is incorrect, or you don't have an obvious income stream for the service you are rendering. So the questions: Who are you? and How are you doing this for free? Thank you,
- robert18 8y agoI think there are many services similar for free, they most probably have their own TTS
- tiburon 8y agowhy it really matters on who I am? I'm a developer with passion to help people listen to podcasts and the idea was simple. How can I offer it for free? I do a lot of work to make it happen, there will be a premium version with more features which are being cooked with the help of many developers who loved the idea too.
- timClicks 8y agoIt matters because one of your potential customers thinks it matters. And presumably because services without a business model don't have a long future.
- tiburon 8y agotimClicks that is not true, there are many products out there that do not rely on capitals, It does not matter who I am personally. The service is free of charge until we cannot make it free of charge anymore for whatever reason. We are focusing now on user's feedbacks who already added the widget. you can find more answers on our business model there. https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/finished-mvp-to-turn-blogs-to-podcasts-with-ai-what-do-you-think-06553ca565 https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/finished-mvp-to-turn-blog...
- meetbryce 8y agoWhat's the catch? How are you providing this for free.
- kseo3l 8y agoaccording to what he said on another thread it will be free and it will have some paid features on top
- schoolparentins 8y agoI've also tried to see what was the catch but seems like they just want to make it for free, maybe to help people with disabilities. Or maybe the add payment features in the future
- denniskom 8y agoas long as its free, its good. lovely idea! keep it free please.
- t3ra 8y agohttps://read2me.online https://read2me.online Another similar service
- mindwork 8y agoPricing looks expensive, but quality is top notch. Do you know which TTS engine it is?
- edent 8y agoIs there a demo of the UK voice anywhere? I could only find the American one. Very impressed with the audio quality. What's the revenue model?
- krackers 8y ago>Very impressed with the audio quality To me it sounds not much better than Google's standard wavenet TTS (seen here: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/) which is admittedly pretty state of the art but nowhere as good as actual human dictation.
- superfrank 8y agoJust some hopefully constructive criticism, I found the voice used on the "Smart Natural Voice" section to be the most robotic sounding of them all. Specifically, the "Say goodbye to robotic voice, this is nothing like you ever heard before." line sounded very robotic and a bit awkward. I'm not sure if maybe the content of the copy is a little clunky or if it's the voice itself, but that section sounded worse than the other ones, IMO. If possible, I would think about toying with that. The girl's voice in the "Voice Pitch and Speed Control" section sounded far more natural and impressive.
- tiburon 8y agoI'm not here to pitch the idea to make people like it, if you do not like it, be constructive on a given problem. To get a feeling more on how it feels on a blog here is an example: https://websitevoice.com/blog/text-to-speech-dyslexia-and-reading-disabilities/ https://websitevoice.com/blog/text-to-speech-dyslexia-and-re... if the solution does not appeal to you, it surely appeals to others.
- suyash 8y agoCouldn't listen to it for more than 20 seconds, got quite robotic and monotone for me. This would be like flash and auto play videos, cool at first then most annoying thing ever created.
- princess445 8y agomonotone? hahaha you should try the default text to speech from the operating system to see what is monotone
- rosha 8y ago@tiburon thanks for the feature, i truly love it. i've added it to my blog with the JS snippet and it plays now on all the articles! https://jaywad.com/blogs/tips-for-a-productive-morning-routine https://jaywad.com/blogs/tips-for-a-productive-morning-routi... I would wish to be able to customise the play button though.
- dbetteridge 8y agoConstructive criticism , I could not find any samples of the audio on your site. Recommendation, add the plugin to your own homepage for potential users to test it out before having to signup.
- lukeholder 8y agoThere is a large 'try it now' button above the fold.
- pwg 8y agoWhat I see (image: https://postimg.cc/3yg6p19w https://postimg.cc/3yg6p19w) is a "try it now" arrow, but no button, anywhere above the fold.
- tiburon 8y agothanks for the input: there is a demo button here on this page where you enable your website. You can even test the feature without signup. https://websitevoice.com/convert-text-to-audio-free https://websitevoice.com/convert-text-to-audio-free
- dbetteridge 8y agoApologies, looks like your widget domain is being blocked by my work and was preventing the demo button from doing anything.
- PapaSlug 8y agoTypo: "We use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to constantly improve our voice algorithms to make your website text-to-speech is as realistic as possible."
- tiburon 8y agoThanks PapaSlug, i like your username. The Typo is fixed now.
- skilled 8y agoThis looks -- and sounds! -- awesome. I'm not sure if this can compete with Schema's 'Speakable' [1] property (for smart speakers), but for mobile/web browsing this looks amazing. Looking forward to seeing new developments and also the pricing plan eventually. 1: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/speakable https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/speakab...
- sebastienrocks 8y agoThere are some UI issues from what I noticed: At small breakpoints, the UI (especially the "try it now" button) can overlap some text. Sizing also seems off. Another issue I noticed is the play button itself, the entire circle area is clickable, however only the play/pause icon can actually be clicked. There are also numerous accessibility issues. If you're going to advertise this as something to improve accessibility, it might be good to actually concentrate on that for your landing page. I do hope the UI can be improved, as the product looks solid.
- andy_ppp 8y agoAmazon Polly [1] and Google Text to Speech [2] are unfortunately far superior. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ [2] https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/
- hellojason 8y agoI have to agree, plus they’re free for what most users would need. Also noteworthy is the official Amazon Polly for WordPress plugin - https://wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-polly/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-polly/
- mindwork 8y agoIf this is not a wake up call for me, I don't know what it should be. I had this same exact idea for 9 months now but never moved to execute. Reading through site it even has the same wording as in my head. As a developer I wanted to build something like this and it looks easy(without AI part). But following the startup gurus and podcasts I figured that idea should be validated first and to find actual customers is more important than building technology. Here started troubles. I have no skills in marketing and when diving deeper it looked cumbersome for me. I spend free credits on AdSense but it only brought 8 emails for empty newsletter. I'm interested did you do the research on user base? What would be a market for this? Where are you planning to grow the site? Do you have monetization plan? p.s. found a link in comments for read2me.online, and just from demo they sound really good for ears
- bbody 8y agoLikewise, I spent a day building a proof of concept but lost interest after.
- tibbon 8y agoI’ve wondered for a while with NPR doesn’t have both audio and text of all of their programs. Sometimes I can listen, but not read (driving). Sometimes, I can read but not listen (work, or just when I’m without headphones). I realize they want high quality voice, but if at the moment all they have is text that’s ok with me. Not having both of these often means I just skip that article and never come back to it
- ramblerman 8y agoradio ambulante (NPR's spanish podcast) has full transcripts in english and spanish of all their content. The quality of the journalism and topics are outstanding as well. Super useful for learning Spanish.
- jamieweb 8y agoDo you have plans to publish a versioned release with support for Subresource Integrity? Also, is there somewhere that the following is documented? - Required origins for each type of content so that this can be compatible with a Content-Security-Policy - Required use of browser features so that this can be made compatible with a Feature-Policy - Commitments from yourself that the lists of required origins/features will not be added to without prior notice, in order to give time for blog operators to update their headers accordingly Thanks
- kentich 8y agoI use Read Aloud Firefox extension to listen to blog posts.