“ Reading” Articles via Podcast Software
I wrote a while ago on reading articles offline by printing them on paper. The benefit was reduced eye strain and a superior reading experience, without being tethered to any device.
I continue to consume articles this way, with one exception: Long-form articles that are 20+ pages long. I often can’t read them in one session. This added a burden of keeping track of where I’d left off. Reading should be fun, not a chore.
I solved this problem a different way: Convert it to an audio file and add to a podcast feed so I can listen to it while driving. Let the podcast software keep track of where I left off.
My prior experiments with text-to-speech systems failed to impress. The first time was probably in ‘96 or ‘97, where I had Windows read out to me various articles from a local encyclopedia software. While I thought it pretty cool, the proof was in the usage: I stopped using it within days.
Google Cloud was the first service I tried. They support many different voices and accents. I wrote a script that would extract the text of an article, send it to Google Cloud, and save the result as a wav file locally. Since I didn’t want to try all the different voices, I randomly pick one each time.
