Show HN: Text-to-podcast: Repurpose any content into podcasts | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Text-to-podcast: Repurpose any content into podcasts

narratedbypoise.com

48 pointspaulaz30 comments

This is a really cool service for content creators who want to easily switch channels.

Descript offers the ability to go the other way with their transcription service https://www.descript.com/

For readers who want to listen to articles that they like, there's the (free?) Pocket text to speech service, plus other sites like mine (https://blogreader.com.au/) which put TTS articles into a podcast for you.

But does it automatically include ads for mattresses?

That seems to be the reason podcasts exist to begin with.

Because of your comment I googled and came across the company Saatva. I was surprised to see that it is actually a fairly big company which had a revenue of $375 million in 2019. Podcast marketing must be really effective.

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saatva)

And now you know why Spotify is so gung-ho into podcasts, lately.

That and the payola for advertising your content on their platform[0] and the not having to pay artist royalties.

[0] https://support.spotifyforpodcasters.com/hc/en-us/articles/3...

unless this is sarcasm, that is a glaring cause and effect error. consider that maybe already large companies are the ones with money to blow on podcasts.

I bI don't own a TV and blocked pretty much all online advertising in my life.(thanks to nextdns) However am an adamant podcast listener, most days it is probably the only advertisements that reach me.

Haha, no but that's a good feature request :)

Nice. The voice sounded completely real. Are you using AI on the back-end or real humans? If real humans how long is the turnaround time?

The voice itself says it's a real voice, and based on the pricing, it looks like it's just narration-as-a-service rather than any automated technique.

I didn't dive much deeper, but the header text says "Narrated by real voices". I guess that's why it costs $11/500 words, which is an order of magnitude higher than TTS solutions.

> I guess that's why it costs $11/500 words, which is an order of magnitude higher than TTS solutions.

Multiple orders of magnitude.

TTS and VC are going to do to voice over and narration what Getty and Flikr did for photography.

We're not quite there, but we're not far off. Give it two more years.

(I work pretty closely on this domain. I built https://vo.codes, which sounds like shit, but it's adjacent to cutting edge techniques that sound practically real.)

Yes, we work with real narrators who really care about delivering the best possible reading. TTS is fine but it's never going be able to engage an audience in the same way a real voice can.

We wanted to optimise for human engagement so we went to real people :) TTS is fine for some things but very few people actually want to listen to a robot reading to them.

So one issue I can think of with this, would be that you often mold a work to be a podcast, by adding in extra auditory elements that wouldn't work in a pure text format. Listen to the BBC world service, often in their longer pieces they add in auditory clues like a busy street with the sounds of people bustling and so on to clue in the audience about what is happening. I can't imagine a straight rock bottom priced translation to a podcast working super well.

Hey, glad you raised this. It's true that not all content works narrated. We offer an editing service to make content ready for narration & break it up into manageable episodes.

You can hear some of our recent work here https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-simpplr-podcast/id...

Curious if you guys consider licensing voices that would be interesting pairing that with the ability to generate a voice for TTS(that small voice sample model generation tech). Then theoretically can use it for whatever eg. home automation or reading stuff on demand.

The AWS polly voices are decent but would be nice to get a bigger selection.

Hey, I would like to talk more about this. Email me at andy@narratedbypoise.com Thanks!

It's amazing that part of their advertising is that they are offering the ability to hire people for transcription of text to audio for even less than competing services. Why... would anyone work for them when they could work for other services that pay 10x more?

Not sure you're referring to Poise here? We don't offer transcription. We create podcasts from any content.

Yeah, I forgot the proper word for reverse-transcription. Regardless, my actual point which you ignored was:

    Voices.com:   300 words - From $250

    Bunny Studio: 500 words - From $151

    Poise:        500 words - From  $11

Why would any reader work with you, when they are going to be paid at least 10x less than the competition?

Great concept. The other day I stumbled upon https://podcastle.ai/ - I am wondering what makes your product different and how's the performance of conversion so far?

I got very excited at that link and then progressively more and more disappointed. Why do they have a slick animated ad reel with no example of the speech output? Why is there no example anywhere, even on YouTube? What's the point of this as a chrome extension when you can already say "ok Google, read aloud"?

Maybe I'm just salty that I'll never find a good solution for my favorite ebooks that never got an audiobook version.

> with no example of the speech

Right! The only thing this site needs is a "Click here to listen to a sample" and it misses its shot.

Not to be confused with https://podcastle.org/, which is a podcast of fantasy short stories.

We use real voices from real people who care about creating an engaging experience for your listeners.

One is voiced by humans the other by ai

When evaluating end-to-end human narration services, the most important factor is audio mastering. For services that target the podcast industry, good quality audio output that can be used as-is is a must.

Absolutely! We only work with narrators who can consistently produce great quality narration.

I want this but for legal cases.

Hey, we can create podcasts from any content. Shoot me an email to andy@narratedbypoise.com and we can help you.

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