Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for listening to your articles | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for listening to your articles

beta.readtomyshoe.com

39 pointsdoomrobo14 comments

ReadtoMyShoe (RTMS) is a web app that lets you upload articles (via URL or via directly pasting) and listen to them (via text-to-speech) at a later time. Some features:

* Offline-first: All the articles in your queue are available offline. RTMS is usable even in airplane mode.

* High-quality text-to-speech: RTMS uses the Google Cloud Text to Speech WaveNet voices. It's not quite human yet, but it's pretty nice.

* Saves your progress: Don't lose your place in your reading material. RTMS will save where you are. So next time you play an article, it'll resume right where you left off.

* Lockscreen controls: Play, pause, jump 10 seconds. It's all available from the lock screen or notification bar of your mobile device.

* Runs anywhere: Since RTMS is a web app, it runs everywhere a (modern) web browser runs.

* Add to Homescreen: RTMS can be added to your homescreen and behave just like a native app.

"Doesn't this exist?" Eh, sorta. I was using Pocket to listen to articles before this, and it was terrible. The UI had (and continues to have) show-stopping bugs, and there are practically never updates for it anymore. There are other apps too, but most of them are native apps, and the only decent ones I could find were also pretty exploitative (lots of pop-ups everywhere, free trials with no pricing info, etc.)

Source code: Everything here is open source. Please leave comments, open PRs, open Issues, etc. at https://github.com/rozbb/readtomyshoe . The whole thing is in Rust!

Finally, a note on this demo site: I can't run this site for very long. Google Cloud TTS is $16 per 1M characters. The average news article is like 6.5k characters, so $0.10. That's not scalable for me, so I gotta shut down the server after a little bit. I do have a rough plan to scale this though and allow for people to pay for their own TTS though: https://github.com/rozbb/readtomyshoe/issues/29

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@doomrobo Thanks for building this! I was about to start my own - vastly simpler - project to do something similar. But my (again, not-sophisticated) approach was to download daily/news articles from my RSS reader (nextcloud, really), pipe them through espeak (or some similar not great but local TTS tool)...and then queue them up for me to listen in my mobile podcast player (like during my morning commute to work, etc.). The intent was to automate this on a somewhat daily basis, such that, when i wake up, all my articles - again mostly news/daily content - would be ready and waiting for me. But, now thanks to you, I can just leverage what you have built (and maybe once i learn rust, submit contributions to your project too)! Thanks again for creating this, and cheers! :-)

> Notice: This is a demo server. Text to speech is expensive. You will be able to add new articles until I have spent $300. This server will be up for about a week.

If this is offline first, then why use a server at all? Why not use the native OS text-to-speech? MacOS has built in text-to-speech and so does Windows (Narrarator?)

Good question. The short answer is that the UX of doing it with local TTS is pretty terrible. The voices will of course vary from device to device. But more importantly, control from the lockscreen doesn't work anymore (I've found you can't really use the web TTS API in a way that plays well with the MediaSession API, the position-resuming functionality, etc)

Browser TTS on Linux is really terrible, for one

What about Android?

We're really talking about iOS and Android here, if I grok the use-case.

Try it out here https://mdn.github.io/dom-examples/web-speech-api/speak-easy...

It's god awful on iOS

Some of those are nightmare inducing.

Android is not really Linux here. It normally includes the proprietary TTS engine from Google, which is quite decent. Even offline, it’s many times better than what Firefox on Linux comes with.

The pocket (read it later) app used to have offline tts in their app and for some reason switched to online tts. Really pissed me off.

This is amazing! the TTS is definitely a lot better than the native browser TTS available.

I see articles in german and dutch in the queue, since English TTS cannot really read other languages, do you detect the language somehow?

Currently no. If you listen to them they sound terrible. But I made a GitHub issue for the ability to change voices, and I hope to be shipping that soon. Autodetection is a bit harder but probably not by much.

If someone uploads copyrighted material, could you be held responsible for distributing it?

Microsoft Edge already offers this (with online TTS) on all platforms, so I assume that the legality is not necessarily suspect.

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