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Comment by yessirwhatever | Hacker News Reader

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/

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.

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I 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.

GitHub pages might work for you.

E.g., https://github.com/wiobyrne/infusing-computing-pod

Hmm, the static site will take a bit of setting up, but I'll look into it. Thank you.

You seriously made all this in half an hour?

Well, 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.

I think most people here would be interested in a write-up.

Oh, good idea. I'll do that!

I've worked with Stavros a lot over the past decade. Half an hour is totally plausible...

I didn’t check OP’s username so your comment made me wonder what an amazing technology platform is Stavros!

I have wondered the same thing myself in the past.

Off-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

By the power of glue code, I manifest products.

You could use Transistor [0].

[0]: https://transistor.fm/

The 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

Hm, 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.

I 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. Thanks for the help!

Nice! 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.

Oh 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!

BTW you might want to ask dang to change the link in the submission too!

The link should be okay, I don't have another website, just the feed is hosted elsewhere (and it's linked in the target page).

Just listened to one of the episodes. Sounds decent. I personally think it would sound a lot better if you slowed down the speed a little bit. 0.75x sounded much better to me.

It depends on which one you heard, there are 3 different voices there.

I have rehosted!:

https://deepdreams.stavros.io/

dang, if you see this, could you repoint the URL to the article? Thanks!

Polly 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.

Hmm, I'll try that, thank you! Very interesting idea.

I 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

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.

The voice of the latest podcast sounds much nicer. It's a fairly convincing nonsense podcast.

I'm glad you think so, I think so too! Now I just need to make them (much) longer.

Googles neural voices are much better than any of Amazon’s.

i don't think so

Agreed. 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.

I ended up really liking the Azure voices, and switched to one of those.

I'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.

100% 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.

AWS 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?

Might not get what you mean by "just"

There are free websites like this: 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/SpeechSynth...

I use AWS Polly to read HN in the mornings

I 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

I 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.

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