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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I'm finding it hard to follow the TTS (but it's growing on me) but the core idea is superb and I'm catching interesting snippets. Changing the TTS voice between items is a genius idea I'd have never thought of myself but it really helps divide it up and keeps my attention.

A suggestion, perhaps, is to lean on tldr.io's system of providing well written short summaries of Hacker News items rather than the actual content. That way it'd sound a lot more like a regular news bulletin and skirt around problems of third party content. (I know one of the founders if you want an intro but I believe you can grab their stuff somehow anyway..)

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Yeah I came across tldr.io the other day and really like the concept. Would love an introduction.

PS: the codename of the backend that powers all this is actually "tldr" since I can't be stuffed reading :)

hey longzheng, cofounder of tldr.io here, petercooper just pointed me to this thread. Please send me an email: stan at tldr io

SoundGecko plus tldr.io would be awesome

I've pointed them to this thread to see what they think. Look forward to seeing this progress. (And as an aside, I really wish someone would crack the TTS 'uncanny valley' problem 100%. It's a surprisingly difficult problem.)

Thanks Peter. Already drafting email.

You're absolutely right about the TTS uncanny valley problem. We're betting on the fact that this is an industry effort. Currently we don't have the resources to really invest in the core TTS technology but always on the look-out for breakthrough/experimental tech.

There's quite a difference between the "normal" voices in OSX, and the high-quality ones. If you have a few spare gigabytes, try out the French, Spanish, and Swedish versions.

For my kids, it's at least a few minutes entertainment to make the computer speak high-quality foreign curse words.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20082143-263/how-to-ins...

I'd never noticed this before - cool! Samantha and Tom in the US English section sound particularly good.

The only major problem I seem to perceive is that the transitions between certain words and phones aren't smooth enough and are jarring. It doesn't sound like they're far off but I guess 90% of the work is in the last 10% ;-)

Does tldr.io provide an RSS feed? If so, just plug it into podcastomatic.com (RSS-to-TTS-podcast) and presto; you have a tldr-podcast.

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