Would you enjoy listening to a radio station that plays HN articles while you travel to work? I know I would! I want to listen to news that I find relevant as I commute. Unfortunately, HN, TechCrunch, and all the good nerd blogs are only available as text.<p>So I’m thinking of making a mobile app to deliver personalized news radio w/ content from blog and news sites.<p>I would use text-to-speech software when necessary, but TTS can only do so well. Most content would be pre-recorded by an actual human with a pleasant voice. (“Do something that doesn’t scale” -PG.)<p>So my question is: Does this sound interesting to you? If I built this, would you be excited to try it?
I strongly recommend you don't use any TTS at all. If I want TTS I can do it myself. I have no need of an app to do it for me.<p>That said, with actual human readers this could go very well. I would like, though, to point out the possibly insurmountable issue that pops up every time someone has an idea like this: copyright.<p>It is a sad state the current copyright laws are in, and a good example of that is how they interfere with the creation of awesome services like this one. IANAL, and all that, but I strongly suspect you'd get hammered down hard if you didn't get explicit permission from the authors of every single article you broadcast.<p>So seriously, speak with a lawyer, please, before taking a single step with this. Perhaps you can find a workaround, or someway to do this regardless. Or maybe not. But at least you won't drown under a mass of lawsuits.
I think the idea is interesting - I played around with a prototype myself about a year ago (using RSS + TTS).<p>You might check out this startup: <a href="http://umanoapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://umanoapp.com/</a> which does almost exactly what you want. I don't know how the business model works exactly, but I would imagine that paying people to narrate would be fairly expensive.<p>You might also have a look at some of the stuff NPR is doing: <a href="http://www.npr.org/infiniteplayer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/infiniteplayer/</a> <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2011/11/14/142303990/introducing-the-infinite-player" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2011/11/14/142303990/introdu...</a> they are working on breaking the traditional radio show mold and queueing up individual stories based on personal recommendation.
Regardless of how you achieved it, it does sound interesting to me. And if you built it, I would be excited to try it. A MVP could just be a podcast. You could pick the best article from HN every day and read it yourself. See how that goes. Best of luck.
I am actually developing a service that is a text to speech solution for any app. So, while you travel to work you can listen to ur email/calendar/other data.
Have you heard of the This Developers Life podcast?<p><a href="http://thisdeveloperslife.com/" rel="nofollow">http://thisdeveloperslife.com/</a>