Hi HN,<p>Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them.<p>So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts.
Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I'll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1]<p>We are starting out by narrating top articles from HN and some longer cryptocurrency white-papers. Giving away 3 top articles from last week and we’ll be sending one more audio article weekly.<p>In future and at scale, we’d love to narrate any article or a document, on demand and with only a few hours turnaround time.<p>Would love your feedback!
What type of content would you like us to narrate?
Is it easy to access the podcast feed?<p>Thanks!<p>[1] <a href="https://readbyhumans.com" rel="nofollow">https://readbyhumans.com</a>
Have you thought about the rights situation here? I don't see anything that indicates that you secured the copyright of the articles you've already provided, and the sites themselves don't have any copyleft notices. I suspect that unless you have ongoing relationships with authors, it's unlikely that you'll be able to both respect their copyrights and turn around "any article or document" in "a few hours turnaround time".
Seems like everyone here, even me, has had this idea -- but to my knowledge you are the only one to do it, so props for that!<p>The person doing the reading has kind of a funny way of reading it no? Bit of an accent, odd emphasis, lack of emotion, robotic style.<p>My opinion is that I won't use it with this narrator, but with a better, more practiced english orator I would.
Had the same idea some time ago but did not have the same level of motivation that you did :D. Lots of kudos. One question I wondered about was the copyright perspective especially in on demand readings. An idea I had was to sell the service to publications. So maybe that's something you'd like to try in the future :).
Some have said this is copyright infringement. Gary claimed so as well. Keep in mind, AFAIK, he is not a lawyer. (Neither am I) but ask your own! There are fair use laws, and especially if you created a trans-formative work, this could be legal! Good luck.<p>I'm personally un-sympathetic to Gary's plight to keep his work super secret. This feeling started when I found out that he asks conference organizers to NOT share the recordings of talks he gives. I'm not sure how often this has happened, but it feels against the spirit of presenting against these events.<p>If I've gotten something wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me, but those are the facts as I see them today.
I started doing this a while back, too! However, I noticed recording takes way more time than I thought it would, and I didn't think I'd be able to keep up with the workload every day. The plan was always to involve the community and different readers, but I'd have to get it started: build a contributors website, do quality control, read stuff myself, etc. It never happened.<p>Would it help if I contribute a few articles a week? My twitter handle is the same as my username, or see my profile for email.
If you like these audio article concepts, check out SpokenLayer. They work with many big publishers.<p><a href="http://www.spokenlayer.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.spokenlayer.com</a>
o_O really? I must be living in the wrong universe. I often wish there were less tutorial videos, podcasts and such and just give me the text. I read much better than listen. Must be me. There's also of course the language barrier although I did get a 8 out of 9 on my IELTS for understanding spoken English and I live in British Columbia for some years now -- but then again, reading comprehension was 8.5 and to this day I have no clue where I lost that half point.
Nice work, Raman. I have one question and 1 feature feedback.<p>How would you scale this up when there are more demands if the product needs real human to read every article?
Maybe that can be your business model (commercial reading for private podcasts) - there will be copyright issue though<p>One feature I think useful for me is that it should be searchable (by voice command is best) and read it from there instead of listening the whole article.
Had a similar idea once upon a time to auto narrate any article using text-to-speech. Got about as far as you did it sounds like. Having human narration seems so plausible if you approached gig style. Between-work actors could read for you instead of driving for Lyft.
If anyone wants to do something similar to this in the command line (simple article text to audio) I have a little one line shell script here. Put the text inside article.txt and then run it. Mac only.<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/reustle/7029e02e171f8a4b13d0" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/reustle/7029e02e171f8a4b13d0</a>