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Medium Audio Stories — Listen to your favorite Medium stories
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@ggnall humans. Text-to-speech (as the Play chrome extension supports) is too robotic. Professional readers imbue personality and engage the listener much more.
@rrhoover @ggnall TTS is starting to become pretty close to passable: https://google.github.io/tacotron/
Audio Stories are a great addition for members. 🙌 I wonder what the process is for selecting stories to make audio versions of. 🤔
I like the idea and especially the fact that you need to be a member to use it (even if I don't currently pay for it 😅) because it will help Medium find a sustainable business model with their membership. I think Pocket could have also done that to help people reduce their Pocket queue. You can already listen to articles saved by using IOS and Android TTS but it's a robot voice, not a professional voice.
This is great! This is what I envisioned long-term for https://www.producthunt.com/post... (RIP) to be, but didn't have the funds to support the idea. I'm super glad to see Medium have built it!
Soon you could be hearing you read it back to yourself. Would be cool if you could highlight sections to review in the text or listen to later.
I used to use an old app called GeckoVoice. It was Amazing. You all should try VoiceDream. While not the prettiest app... it's amazing and the voice is very pleasant though TTS. Just connect it to your Pocket Account and you are business. Doesn't matter if it's a medium Or NYT article.
Voice Dream: Best Text to Speech App via @ProductHunt
https://www.producthunt.com/post...
Top Hunter
How soon before this content is available on Alexa-enabled devices?
@chrismessina As far as I know there is no availability to create alexa skills that allow third party voice to be delivered to the consumer. any other knowledge about that? cheers.
This is really cool. Does the writer of an article make a voice file too? Or is the voice recording done by someone at Medium?
@robert_maisano Thanks! We have some narrations that writers record themselves, and then other ones we get professional voice actors and actresses to voice
@ktzhu This is absolutely wonderful. Congrats. We need to show you something we are building that you should find very interesting. Have gotten an intro to Monica & EV, and will reach out soon. But would love to get you in the loop right from the beginning. We love Product/Engineering folks, given that's what we are. Do let me know. Cheers.
:( what if i have a podcast on medium?
check this out guys! http://neox.fm <- This is the podcast on medium O.o can i send you the audio to include or something?
Finally, a solid justification for Medium membership! I'm disappointed they didn't include the ability to change playback speed...TTS wins there. Audm supports speed on narrated articles but it's $7/month.
Is there a story I can listen to for free? Before I decide to subscribe, I'd really like to hear an example.
Always nice to see people catching up with what we've been doing at TidBITS for years. :-) We record most articles (it doesn't make sense for everything) and make them available directly from the article or as a podcast. Our versions aren't terribly popular with our readers, so I wouldn't bet big money on this effort from Medium continuing in the long run or attracting a vast listenership. (We do it as much as a final editing pass as anything else.) Doing the recording is also quite a bit of work, both on the reading and technical sides. See http://tidbits.com/article/12953 for a writeup of what we do technically.
Awesome. Some similarities to Audm (https://www.producthunt.com/post...), though Audm is specifically about longform journalism.
How does this compare with Speechkit (speechkit.io)? I'm looking for ways to embed similar tech in PR release etc
I'm actually rather happy with TTS used by Pocket to read out my saved articles. I listen at almost X2 speed and I find it to be an excellent use of my 'dead' commuting time. I'm kind of addicted ;-)
I actually save most of my articles from Medium (which plays very nice with Pocket).
While this is cool, especially the fact that it's a real human voice and not a horrible text-to-speech synthesiser, I really wish there was a more general "reading things out app", which would work with any URL or data source, not just Medium articles.
Also I'd like an app where the voice doesn't just read off the text verbatim, but goes more slowly over complicated phrases and sentences, perhaps drops out here and there to explain and clarify stuff, and just generally covers it in a way that's super accessible and understandable to someone who is on-the-go and mildly distracted.
Something I find so annoying is having to stop in the middle of walking a busy street just to try and scrub back a podcast by 15 seconds so I can re-hear a particularly tricky 10 seconds that I didn't quite catch. So I want to flow and speed to be slow enough for me to completely absorb the ideas while out walking/commuting, without having to scrub.
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