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What if you want to hear about the latest arxiv updates while on your morning run?

This seems like a fantastic idea for that purpose.

I mean, couldn't you do it with a program that takes an RSS feed, parses the abstract from each paper and puts ot through a run of the mill TTS engine?

Sure, I've done something similar to that in a few hours.

The free TTS options aren't great still, and "just the abstract" is not the problem. I did full articles, and the hard...er (it was a few hours) part was extracting out the relevant sections of full papers without the 'junk' info (page numbers, superscript citations, 7 pages of authors in any cern paper, etc.

So you get something, but it's often not good.

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