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Colony FM — Read with your ears. Anytime. Anywhere.
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Replies
@marcosmoralez Wow, thank you Marcos! Agree with the robotic voice part...I love Pocket, but I can't deal with robot voices just yet...
Colony FM turns any webpage into audio narrated by real people. I've been wanting something like this to exist for a long time for my commute.
Does anyone know what's their business model?
Having real people narrating it's awesome, but it seems costly. :)
@danflopes Not as costly as you would think ;-) At the moment, we're just building out content and a narrating base. We're looking into subscriptions in the future, but people who've signed up with us already will be grandfathered in :D
SpokenLayer has been trying this for 5 years. It doesnt work because the way content is written does not lend to a good listening experience. Just think of how an NPR story is told as a journey where a WSJ story is all revealed in the title and first paragraph with the details to follow.
The solution is to take the best written web content and re-write it for the best listening experience.
@gladrobot This is a good point, and a good insight into some of the problems with narrating. You're right, that sometimes the best articles don't sound the same when reproduced in audio form. I think the best way I like to think about this is as a news-alternative to audiobooks. I almost always prefer reading visually, but situations like driving, exercising, and multi-tasking makes reading hard!
@michaeljsuen1 yes, reading is impossible or unwanted in many situations. That's why audio is perfect. You have to make the narrative engaging or people will mentally tune out after 5 seconds.
Cool! How does this compare to something like Pocket Listen and Instapaper where both allow you to listen to saved articles?
@bentossell Hey Ben! The main difference here is that we have real people doing the reading. Yes it's not instantaneous like those services, but the quality is absolutely night and day, in our opinion :)
Can I hook this up to my Pocket queue and request readings? There are some really good flows that you could do:
Single article flow:
1) Connect Pocket and list articles
2) Select an article to have recorded
3) See a queue of recorded articles
4) Play an article
5) Mark it as read (and optionally recommend through pocket)
Commuter/Work flow:
1) Connect Pocket
2) Input the amount of time you have to listen to articles (e.g. 20 minutes for commute, 1 hour for work)
3) Automatically select a combination of articles from the queue to fill the allotted time.
4) Listen to the recordings as a playlist
5) Mark each article as read when you've listened to it
6) Allow user to optionally recommend each article as they listen (or just after)
Just some suggested features - this would get me to use the service, and I'd be willing to pay more than most monthly subscriptions for these.
@techwraith That's a wonderful suggestion! Unfortunately we are not ready for that yet :-p but this is definitely something we will keep in mind! Thank you!
@rotemthegolfer at the moment, a couple hours, but we are hiring more people to shorten that process drastically :D
@rotemthegolfer Oh...good question! At the moment, no, though we have gotten requests in French and German :-P
@rotemthegolfer you can try using https://www.producthunt.com/tech... for listening articles right away. When it's ready in colony.fm move on listening there.
Tried it sounds great!. @michaeljsuen1 link in the invite email seems to be broken. It appears like this signup/?code=pMdBD. I think the domain name is missed. I guess it needs to be like this https://colony.fm/signup?code=pMdBD
@manojnahar Thanks for the feedback! Don't know why the invite feature seems to be broken...looking into that now!
Nice. We've built almost the same thing but with TTS technology https://www.producthunt.com/tech...
You can listen your pocket articles in any podcasting app on any device.
What ended up happening here @michaeljsuen1 ? Would you be willing to give a post-mortem?
Seems pretty cool! Would be even better if either Colony FM acquired Mybridge 2.0 and made an audible feed relevant to your liking. I would be HOOKED! Something like it use to exist by the name of UMANO, but it was acquired by Dropbox and *poof*
@ericpatriq Thanks a really interesting suggestion. I haven't used Mybridge myself, but I'm going to look into it. One of our advisors is actually a former Umano co-founder ;-)
@michaeljsuen1 That's excellent! I loved Umano, shame that Dropbox kept it as an inward tool though. I knew something sounded familiar when I heard about this service! Excited to see where Colony FM goes! My assumption is that your advisor is Prabhdeep, keep up the great work Michael!
Awesome job Michael, I love taking advantage of the cognitive surplus of the internet and having others record the content. http://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/49dc...
I like the idea and am looking forward to receiving the audio but I find it a bit frustrating that I'm given basically zero information on what happening after I bookmarked something and how long its going to take.
Also any way to integrate this with email? A few friends send me lengthy replies and i'd like to listen while im commuting.
Also how does the playback happen? Do we stream it download it? If im not connected to wifi streaming a long article might zap my data, it the one reason I stopped using soundcloud.
Offline playback would be much needed
Is it just for articles in English or does it take other languages as well? If you need someone to help with narrating in say, Russian, or German, I would love to help out :-)
@lecanardmalade Haha, no Russian or German right now, but if you would like, sent me a message on Twitter :P
Hey @michaeljsuen1! Was trying to send you a PM on Twitter but can't :-( However, still interested :-)
Hi Product Hunt!
I’m a co-founder of www.colony.fm. We initially built Colony FM because we wanted to be able to listen to articles while on-the-go. We made a decision early on to have real people reading the articles, and things got off to a good start! As people began using it, we realized that a lot of people came to us with requests for pieces and webpages that didn’t always make our curation list, so we decided to build a product that emphasized this power more!
The Colony FM you see here gives everyone the power to curate and request their own playlists for listening-later. The way we see it as is a service with the one-click save functionality of Pocket/Instapaper, but with the result being a listen-later experience instead of reading-later.
We’re still building out and adding to our team of voice actors, but we’d love to get your feedback and answer any questions you may have.
Best,
Michael
Top Hunter
@michaeljsuen1 I've really missed @tokuku's Umano ever since Dropbox acquired them. It'd be great to see this full in their shoes!
I noticed that the onboarding flow isn't mobile friendly. Any plans to do a native app or integrate into podcasting apps like Overcast?
@chrismessina @tokuku Hey Chris! One of Umano's co-founders (Anton) is actually our main advisor, so it's awesome that you mentioned them! There is a mobile app (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/...) which hopefully addresses the mobile friendliness issue you brought up!
@michaeljsuen1 @chrismessina @tokuku I was an early investor in Umano and loved the product very much and liked Ian and the team, but they dumped a lot of money into that business and very much struggled to build a sustainable model. And they were choosing the content you could listen too, whereas I can request anything from your service. Although that is quite attractive (just requested a @paulgraham essay I haven't read yet) and interested to see whether you do all that is requested or reject some for this or that reason. I'm sure Anton has shared some of the content licensing challenges with you around charging for audio versions of content they don't own -- but i'm sure you've cracked that nut already. Sucked that Dropbox shut the service dow and the team couldn't find someone to take over what they built, and man, they built a huge stack there over the 3 or so years. I suggested to them to try the pay to record model, personally, if the price was good, I would pay to have things read. There was another company that did this, Voicebunny i think, but it was outrageously expensive. My thought was then you could say the owner of the content is actually the person that paid for it but you could then you could let it be shared under their profile in the app or website or something and if you were contacted by the content owner you might be able to claim UGC and just remove it upon request. Anyway, good luck. I used Umano every day, it was awesome.
@sollytweet @chrismessina @tokuku @paulgraham Jeff, thank you for your honest and insightful feedback. We did talk to Anton about some of this, but it's great hearing your experience on this. I'm really happy to see from your comment and the comments of many others that people have a real need for something like this, and we are going to work very hard to make sure we learn and improve moving forward! Thanks again, Jeff!
love audio books --- this is so cool - taking the radio experience to this platform ... nice
@samir_doshi Yep! Huge fan of audio books which is part of where the inspiration came from :D
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