Show HN: Blog Reader – Listen to webpages via a personal podcast

blogreader.com.au

4 points·The_Amp_Walrus··6 comments

I've been working on this for the past few weeks and was surprised to see pretty polished competitor posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454863

Oh well, great minds think alike!

EDIT: Similarly, this uses Google's Text to Speech (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/). If this gets some traction I would love to develop my own TTS model using WaveNet (https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...), since the TTS API is super expensive.

I thought about adding tts to my blog too. I would start from https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

Thanks for sharing. Went through the sample audios they seem to be much better than Google TTS.

Are you referring to the "basic" Google TTS or the WaveNet option? I believe the WaveNet voices are much, much better than those produced my any other TTS service or publicly available model, but I'd love to see some counter-examples.

I can use Edge browser for the same. Then why should I pay $12 per hour?

- The Edge browser feature requires you to select text and then listen to it while you have the webpage open, my service can be used asynchronously like any other podcast - when you are commuting, cooking etc.

- The Edge browser text-to-speech feature sounds stilted and robotic, and I personally would not want to listen to it for an hour. The TTS converter than I am using sounds better, but costs money. Check out the demos at the bottom of the landing page for some examples.

- My service costs $2 AUD per hour, not $12 per hour.

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