Show HN: Anycast+ – An AI-powered podcast app

As someone who consumes a lot of Hal-9000 and produced audio, I would say they diverge into very different experiences. Former, especially if you settle on a robot voice is almost like "reading", in that that you can learn to apply personal imagination over "neutral" audio. It can be more active. Latter is more experiencing, producer influences how you think about work based on voice casting / performance. It can be more passive. Caveate being I think more writers in future will hop on AI voice / audio production once technology matures, and you'll have creators personally direct "definitive" editions of how their audio is suppose to be experienced.

Yes! And books. Importantly, I want it to be a verbatim reading and mention e.g. in-between sections that "it's now reading an info box", or describe a picture, etc.

I tried this by getting Claude to write the text (based on the pdf) and then putting that into elevenlabs for audio (quite expensive) and for what it's worth that worked quite great.

Audm for scientific papers. Need some good time-stamping so it's easy for people to skip to the section they care about.

I've converted a few fan fictions into audiobooks using edge-tts (https://github.com/rany2/edge-tts).

It uses a reverse engineered API from MS Edge to use the more premium MS voices for free. A bit of a grey area, but it works remarkably well.

We are actually working on turning papers into audio books. Would appreciate any feedback: https://vocademic.com/

I have found huge gaps with how digestible different audiobooks are.

It's so painful when there is a book I am really excited to listen to and find that I just can't. Maybe I just mentally drop out mid-sentence or the words float past without carrying any meaning and it can be difficult to pin down why.

One aspect is the performance. An accent or an intonation can cause a nails on blackboard type revulsion. A morose, monotone or bored voice, ugh? For example, I just can't do any Scott Brick performance (which is pretty annoying given how prolific he is) because he trails off every sentence in this weird pitch change that doesn't match how any normal person speaks. It causes me this distressing mental dissonance because it's so disconnected to the passage being read. I suspect it's a result of him just reading out words blind and not talking like a human trying to communicate specific meanings and feelings.

This is also the problem with robot voices - the difference between a joke, a question, an assertion, a doubt, sarcasm or self-delusion can all be in the intonation. With text you might pause and revoice a passage to catch a meaning but the conveyor belt of audio means the next words are upon you giving no chance for reflection. The place where I can handle a robot voice is when using it with the text in front of me. I quite like it as a pace setter. I still have my own internal voice giving flavour but gain some reading endurance when tired or the material is boring/dry and I keep mentally wandering off.

The other aspect is the style of writing - some writing is delightful to read but awful to listen to. The parameters includes everything from sentence structure to vocabulary. A simple example is lists: perfect for quickly imbibing visually but can be maddening to hear read out. Same with numbers, or parentheticals or footnotes or... so I generally can't listen to anything technical.

The most listenable things for me is anything in a conversational style. However, even dialogue dominated works can be torture when they use certain patterns of "he said"/"she said" directions that are effectively punctuation and silent when we read but overwhelming when voiced. A first-person diary style often fits with being spoken without changes. There is a probably an AI opportunity to rewrite books to more resemble radio plays that work better as voice performances.

IMHO voicing technical works needs some brand new ideas. Real life conference talks that just narrate their paper are torture to sit through. Successfully engaging speakers use personality, humour, anecdotes and structure talks playfully with setup/reveals, hypotheticals, pauses for thought and have all sorts of rhetorical tricks to bring drama to the driest content.

Exists and is open source: https://github.com/jdrbc/podly_pure_podcasts/tree/main

This extension works if you’re listening on a computer

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

what are you listening to podcasts on that it's not easy to skip ads?

I'm using Downcast. It's a fairly old app. I think it defaults to +30s +2m -30s buttons which IIRC are settable. It's trivial to skip the ads. I don't need AI to solve that.

$5/mo is exactly what https://www.adblockpodcast.com/ costs.

Well killer of podcasts at least.

It sounds like a useful feature, but I am worried it may have potential legal risks.

I have it! It's called having a thumb to press +15s (it works also with other fingers, nose, limbs, voice...)

Good idea. I was originally supposed to support transcription in the podcast RSS specification, but since there are not many podcasts implementing this field, I have not yet added this support.

Hello, the Google Play version is still in alpha testing. You can join googlegroups through the link on the home page to get access to the alpha version.

Yes, I am planning to implement this feature. In the future, there will be more AI-related features, such as AI recommendations, support for more languages, and a more versatile podcast knowledge chatbot.

Yes I am very impressed with the summary function and the chapter assignments which are amazingly useful to jump around to find the best of parts to go back and snip. Export text to note apps is also huge once the collection is big enough over time.

I keep wishing they would buy Audible ;)

Yes, snipd is very good. But for me: 1. It does not support Chinese transcription 2. It is more like a note-taking software rather than a podcast software. Therefore, I still developed this app.