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Interesting concept. Two suggestions: 1- Don't host on anchor. Podcasting is an open standard. Don't let companies (like Spotify or Apple) take it over. Check
by yessirwhatever 5y ago
Interesting concept. Two suggestions:
1- Don't host on anchor. Podcasting is an open standard. Don't let companies (like Spotify or Apple) take it over. Check https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/
2- The voice is too mechanical for this to be actually reasonable to listen to at night, potentially could be listenable with AWS Polly Neural voices, it's pretty good.
- zebraflask 5y agoI like the idea, it's fun playing around with text-to-speech generators. AWS Polly is slick, nicely done. But podcasts? There has got to be a more interesting use case than that.
- stavros 5y agoI didn't much love hosting on Anchor/Spotify, but I made this in half an hour and I didn't want to have to get into RSS/site generation. Do you know of an easy way to dump audio files and some metadata somewhere and get a Podcast with RSS? I can upload there as well. I'll try Polly, thanks! The current voice annoys me too.
- steve918273 5y agoGitHub pages might work for you. E.g., https://github.com/wiobyrne/infusing-computing-pod https://github.com/wiobyrne/infusing-computing-pod
- stavros 5y agoHmm, the static site will take a bit of setting up, but I'll look into it. Thank you.
- pqdbr 5y agoYou seriously made all this in half an hour?
- stavros 5y agoWell, it might have taken 45'. It's all auto-generated, it was really quick. I wrote a script later to automate the audio mixing, that took another hour. Now I can generate a ready-to-upload episode with one command, though.
- JshWright 5y agoI've worked with Stavros a lot over the past decade. Half an hour is totally plausible...
- malshe 5y agoI didn’t check OP’s username so your comment made me wonder what an amazing technology platform is Stavros!
- JshWright 5y agoI have wondered the same thing myself in the past.
- ayewo 5y agoOff-topic: Speaking of the OP's username, it seems he originally used to go by StavrosK [1] on HN for several years, right? I initially didn't recognize the username because it was all-lowercase, so I'm curious why the rename from StavrosK to stavros? 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stavrosk https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stavrosk
- 5y ago
- leodriesch 5y agoYou could use Transistor [0]. [0]: https://transistor.fm/ https://transistor.fm/
- mtlynch 5y agoThe main problem is giving out the anchor.fm domain for your RSS feed, as it marries you to Anchor forever. In theory, you can get anchor to 301 redirect your subscribers somewhere else, but I've found that podcast clients tend to keep the old URL. You can use Anchor to generate your RSS feed and host your content while still sharing the RSS URL on a domain you own. So you'd give out a URL like feeds.deepdreams.com/rss, and it would proxy the response from Anchor's RSS feed I wrote a simple Go cloud function that can proxy your Anchor RSS URL for you: https://github.com/mtlynch/rss-proxy https://github.com/mtlynch/rss-proxy
- stavros 5y agoHm, yeah, I should at least whip up something like that. Getting the domain is easy, I just don't want to have to set up another static site or service just to proxy a file... Maybe I should bite the bullet and set up GitLab pages plus a simple script to output an RSS feed.
- stavros 5y agoI ended up setting GitLab pages to just curl the XML feed every time I publish, so now it's at https://deepdreams.stavros.io/feed.xml https://deepdreams.stavros.io/feed.xml. Thanks for the help!
- mtlynch 5y agoNice! Glad it was helpful. It's one of those things that's hard to do after you've got a bunch of subscribers, so I'm always glad if I can warn people early in their podcast against getting stuck with their host.
- stavros 5y agoOh definitely agreed, I aim to always own my stuff, but this was so quick and dirty that I figured it doesn't matter enough. Still, since it was this easy to do, better safe than sorry!
- gumby 5y ago
- robbedpeter 5y agoPolly supports ssml tags for nuanced vocal inflection and emphasis. Gpt-3 could probably output high quality tags if you run your content back through with an ssml prompt.
- stavros 5y agoHmm, I'll try that, thank you! Very interesting idea.
- quiffledwerg 5y agoGoogles neural voices are much better than any of Amazon’s.
- yessirwhatever 5y agoi don't think so
- daneel_w 5y agoAgreed. I recently built an internal application allowing our customer reps to play around with ideas using text-to-speech before sending the "copy" to a studio for a professional human recording, and included both Google WaveNet and Amazon Polly in the available voice synthesis choices. Polly is in its own right plain and simply mediocre for the most part, and in comparison to WaveNet it's just awful.
- stavros 5y agoI ended up really liking the Azure voices, and switched to one of those.
- TriNetra 5y agoI've tried both of them and even Microsoft Neural speech and IBM's ones; eventually, Microsoft one has sounded me the most clear and natural amongst these four services.
- social_quotient 5y ago100% agree. Azure voices are the best. I wish Polly would catch up since most of our stacks are there but we keep going back to azure for this one specific thing.
- kevincox 5y agoI don't see the problem here. It has an RSS feed so you can easily use an podcatcher you want https://anchor.fm/s/7735d924/podcast/rss https://anchor.fm/s/7735d924/podcast/rss Really the main concern I would say is that the author doesn't own the domain so they are locked in, but I don't see how this affects listeners.
- yosito 5y agoAWS Polly looks interesting! I wish it supported some more languages, for personal reasons. Maybe I'll try to set something up that reads ebooks, tweets, or news articles to me with this. Do you know if there are any similar quality TTS tools for less technical applications? I mean, where you can just type in the text you want and get an audio file with a high quality voice?
- jcun4128 5y agoMight not get what you mean by "just" There are free websites like this: https://ttsreader.com/ https://ttsreader.com/ But TTS is built into browsers as well eg (this it would need some code not much) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechSynthesis https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechSynth... I use AWS Polly to read HN in the mornings
- asxd 5y agoThe voice of the latest podcast sounds much nicer. It's a fairly convincing nonsense podcast.
- stavros 5y agoI'm glad you think so, I think so too! Now I just need to make them (much) longer.
- mekkie 5y agoI actually think the voice is pretty good for sleeping, feels very droney. but the nonsensicalness of the stories made it harder to sleep because my brain was trying to figure out what was going on