Hacker News Reader

Comment by longzheng | Hacker News Reader

I find I don't have enough time to read all the stuff on Hacker News, but I spend heaps of time on the train where I’m usually listening to music.

Since I work at a startup doing some stuff with text-to-speech, I hacked together this text-to-speech "radio station" so I can listen to Hacker News on my mobile instead of music.

It uses native HTML5 audio that worked fine with iOS and Android in my testing (though some OEMs like HTC screw up the player skin), and uses the RSS feed to grab top articles. Obviously TTS isn’t perfect, but I find most articles except coding ones are comprehensible.

Let me know of any suggestions.

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These guys rock. I'd been using SoundGecko to que up and convert articles for listening on the train. Syncs with Dropbox or Drive, done. Love the concept of putting a dedicated station for content providers, social aggregators like HN.

Re. HTML5 audio, until recently Chrome for Android had a problem where if you closed the screen/changed tab it would cease the audio playback.

With the new Chrome Beta app, it solves this. Download it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrome.bet... - hopefully after testing this change will be pushed to standard Chrome.

Brilliant work. Great to see that you designed it to work on phones. I look forward to the TLDR feature ;)

Is the audio streamed over cellular? It would be cool to preload clips over WiFi before hitting the road.

Yeah unfortunately there isn't a lot of control over HTML5 audio AFAIK. There is a preload option but it's specific to the individual <audio> element.

Maybe as a hack I could change it so each article has a hidden <audio> somewhere that preloads it in the background, then when you actually play back it should use cache.

I don't know if that's wise over a cell connection though, downloading all the MP3s.

Perhaps a better approach would be to add a "preload" button, and then use the hidden element as you suggested so we aren't loading audio we aren't interested in.

Another idea would be to add a personal user queue to do the same thing. Awesome site btw.

Audio is the worse way to consume content, why not just use Evernote or whatever and read what you've missed? Then you can continue to listen to music and catch up with what you've missed while you're on the train.

I actually find that Audio is my favorite way to consume content because I usually want to use my sight and hands to be doing something more proactive and creative (ie. programming)

Perhaps this is unique to myself, but I have found that I can function amazingly well digesting something through Audio and working on something visually. I have no formal neuroscience education, but perhaps it's something to do with how the brain (or perhaps just my brain) processes various inputs and outputs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functio...

As a secondary note to the author of this app. What a great idea! I really like where you guys are going with this. I do find it hard to listen to as the narrator still sounds like a robot. But I'm sure with enough time this will be solved as well.

I can't code and listen to speech audio at the same time. I can do it if I'm only pattern-matching or doing something that is only visual and doesn't take much conscious thought. I used to listen to audiobooks at an old job whenever I had to do tedious work, digging through spreadsheets for anomalous data. And, I now listen to audiobooks while I'm riding my bike or exercising.

I figured that it was because coding, or writing something like this comment, uses the speech center of my brain, as does the incoming audio stream. Music doesn't have any adverse affects on my ability to code or write comments, since I don't really pay attention to any of the vocals that may be present.

As an audiobook fanatic, my go to explanation for audio's effectiveness is that speaking and listening were the human race's primary way of transmitting and receiving information until very recently - the era of most of the human race being literate is a blink in the scale of evolutionary history.

A recent article on audiobooks (in the New Yorker, I think?) cited studies saying that audiobook readers had markedly better recall of physical descriptions in books, presumably because the visual processing centers of the brain aren't occupied with the task of reading itself.

Keep up the great work longzheng! You guys rock.

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