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..)
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.
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.
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 wonder how difficult/viable it would be to crowd source actual people reading the articles? I am sure there must be radio journalist students who wouldn't mind reading pieces for feedback from listeners (on their reading?).
Nice job! Just the other day I was thinking about how great it would be to have a voice-read readability (http://readability.com/).
* Is there any way to go to the listing on HN? (I like to check comments occasionally).
* When clicking "View original article" it takes me to a separate page where the article is read and there's a new button to visit the original article. When I click the new button it loads the article in the frame. Is there any way all this can be collapsed to just one step? (I click it the first time, it goes to the separate page and already has the article loaded).
* It would be really interesting to have a bookmarklet for this like with readability.
Can we get an option to speed up the voice? I think I can process info a little faster than base speed. I believe I saw something where blind people who use screen readers have the output come at blazing speeds.
Also is it possible to skip links, or replace links with a ding noise? I'm not likely going to write links down to visit them, but if i'm interested, i'd probably go back into the article to click it.
Now, if only we could somehow provide the comment threads, and allow us the ability to assign voices to different handles. I imagine something like a booming Voice of God for pg, annoyed grammarian for tptacek, maybe an old Mac-style gibbering lunatic for losethos, etc.
:)
EDIT: I just tried to listen to A Tale of Two Cities from Gutenberg on SoundGecko. I think I broke it. Anyway to cancel a job?
On my Macbook OSX Mountain Lion, it works great and started playing on load (Which didn't happen when i loaded in on iOS but thats to be expected)
One thing that REALLY bugged me was this: The link on each item that reads "View Original Article" just links to the service: SoundGecko - It doesn't link to the original article at all!! - Not even the HN post so the source and the context (HN Comments) is reachable AT ALL!!
Seriously this site is brilliant, BUT what you've done - In my opinion this is unacceptable, at least link to the original article author.
and then linking to the service you're scraping as a courtesy
This is absolutely fantastic! I occasionally have to make 2+ hour commutes to/from jobs, and I've long been wanting a way to digest the latest tech news while driving down the road.
Plus, I never have the forethought or, the desire to sift through the various pod casts and guess at which would I would like or find interesting, so being able to 'tune' into the front page seems like an excellent way to pass the time.
Excellent work, man. You've literally built the exact thing I've been wanting for a long time.
One feature addition that would be revolutionary (IMHO) would be to allow blog authors to embed an audio version of the story, in their own voice, using a custom HTML5 tag. Then, when you parse their page, use the supplied audio instead of TTS. Then, in conjunction with this, give preference to stories with supplied audio, so an HN page 3 story gets promoted to a top story on your radio app, as reward for the effort of supplying the audio.
One suggestion off the top of my head is to allow for offline listening. Ie, configure soundgecko to get a snapshort of HN front page at say 5pm, TTS the front page contents, email the sound file as an attachment for listening.
This would be extremely useful for areas that has low mobile phone signal, or countries data plans are expensive or/and restrictive. (looking at you Australia!)
If you click on, "What is Soundgecko", there's a forever looping background movie that looks really cool. It looks like it's downloading 2.8mb of the movie every time the previous 2.8mb finishes downloading, how does this work? Is it something like Node.js file streaming?
[Link here](http://soundgecko.com/)
I'd be awesome if this was on github so people could improve the parsing. For one, it reads stuff that is obviously not meant to be read "live", but are just informational tables.
I'd also be awesome if this was a Shoutcast stream that also had live people doing shows as well.
Edit: Also, switch voices between entries, and continue reading entires one after the next.
Yeah parsing is a tough challenge for something as diverse as Hacker News where the content could be anything between a thesis, a blog post, to a picture gallery.
Will investigate Shoutcast but there might not be enough content to have a continuous stream of content.
You'll be glad to know it already switches voices between entries and automatically plays the following entry :)
A really cool idea, I'm going to used this extensively I think.
One thing though: you need to put in audio clues as to when one article ends and another begins. I'm not looking at the player and sometimes the same voice gets selected for two consecutive articles, and I have no idea a new article just began!
Loved it,though its still paining to work it flawless on my Dolphin browser. I'd be more happy if we had RSS feed for this station. I'd love to import that RSS directly in to my Pulse reader and consume all podcast right in to pulse without leaving.
EDIT: And, How to get this the hacker-news as my Soundgecko channel?
I agree, please clarify, because this sounds extremely useful. Within the Pocket app, if I tap on an article's title, it doesn't highlight, it opens. Then two-finger tap does nothing. Long tap in a paragraph highlights one word with the option to speak that word.
So I just tried it with: Bascamp Personal, the Bascamp for all your projects outside of work.
For me the link bait was super obvious when read and kind of ruined it, at least in this case. It felt like they said Basecamp 150 times in less then 2 minutes.
It's been a while since I actively followed TTS, but the speech of this one sounds surprisingly good. The service itself is useful as well. It could be a bit more interactive for my taste, but works quite well!
Thumbs up. I've been a fan of Long Zheng's work since his Taskforce Initiative (which inspired what I am doing now on the side). I use MetroTwit daily. And now I've got to take a closer look at SoundGecko.
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
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..)
[+] [-] longzheng|13 years ago|reply
PS: the codename of the backend that powers all this is actually "tldr" since I can't be stuffed reading :)
[+] [-] hnoob|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] longzheng|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] teknover|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fudged71|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekurutepe|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnriot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miket|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaunxcode|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryans|13 years ago|reply
http://umanoapp.com/
[+] [-] yarone|13 years ago|reply
Still haven't seen. Still would love to it for my commutes.
[+] [-] dvoiss|13 years ago|reply
* Is there any way to go to the listing on HN? (I like to check comments occasionally).
* When clicking "View original article" it takes me to a separate page where the article is read and there's a new button to visit the original article. When I click the new button it loads the article in the frame. Is there any way all this can be collapsed to just one step? (I click it the first time, it goes to the separate page and already has the article loaded).
* It would be really interesting to have a bookmarklet for this like with readability.
[+] [-] BinaryBullet|13 years ago|reply
Anyways, here it is (YMMV):
https://gist.github.com/4596293
[+] [-] eumenides1|13 years ago|reply
Can we get an option to speed up the voice? I think I can process info a little faster than base speed. I believe I saw something where blind people who use screen readers have the output come at blazing speeds.
Also is it possible to skip links, or replace links with a ding noise? I'm not likely going to write links down to visit them, but if i'm interested, i'd probably go back into the article to click it.
[+] [-] angersock|13 years ago|reply
:)
EDIT: I just tried to listen to A Tale of Two Cities from Gutenberg on SoundGecko. I think I broke it. Anyway to cancel a job?
EDIT2: It got it! Awesome!
[+] [-] jval|13 years ago|reply
Are you guys using some kind of proprietary solution? Sounds really clear.
[+] [-] longzheng|13 years ago|reply
My startup has licensed some premium text-to-speech engines for a pretty penny so you get what you pay for!
[+] [-] iambot|13 years ago|reply
One thing that REALLY bugged me was this: The link on each item that reads "View Original Article" just links to the service: SoundGecko - It doesn't link to the original article at all!! - Not even the HN post so the source and the context (HN Comments) is reachable AT ALL!!
Seriously this site is brilliant, BUT what you've done - In my opinion this is unacceptable, at least link to the original article author.
and then linking to the service you're scraping as a courtesy
[+] [-] goostavos|13 years ago|reply
Plus, I never have the forethought or, the desire to sift through the various pod casts and guess at which would I would like or find interesting, so being able to 'tune' into the front page seems like an excellent way to pass the time.
Excellent work, man. You've literally built the exact thing I've been wanting for a long time.
[+] [-] drcode|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yitchelle|13 years ago|reply
One suggestion off the top of my head is to allow for offline listening. Ie, configure soundgecko to get a snapshort of HN front page at say 5pm, TTS the front page contents, email the sound file as an attachment for listening.
This would be extremely useful for areas that has low mobile phone signal, or countries data plans are expensive or/and restrictive. (looking at you Australia!)
[+] [-] plasma|13 years ago|reply
Definitely going down this path in terms of offline support.
[+] [-] sunwooz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DiabloD3|13 years ago|reply
I'd also be awesome if this was a Shoutcast stream that also had live people doing shows as well.
Edit: Also, switch voices between entries, and continue reading entires one after the next.
[+] [-] longzheng|13 years ago|reply
Will investigate Shoutcast but there might not be enough content to have a continuous stream of content.
You'll be glad to know it already switches voices between entries and automatically plays the following entry :)
[+] [-] dreen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivabz|13 years ago|reply
EDIT: And, How to get this the hacker-news as my Soundgecko channel?
[+] [-] alaskamiller|13 years ago|reply
I've been doing something similar on my iPhone for awhile:
1. Send articles to Pocket
2. Highlight article
3. Two-finger tap to bring up context menu then tap Speak
With TTS voice speed set to 1.6x and British Female and it's a good way to wake up in the morning and absorb in wikipedia entries or news.
[+] [-] moioci|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danialtz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slajax|13 years ago|reply
For me the link bait was super obvious when read and kind of ruined it, at least in this case. It felt like they said Basecamp 150 times in less then 2 minutes.
[+] [-] slajax|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] po84|13 years ago|reply
Shameless plug of an old, but related, blog post: http://mindtrove.info/my-ipad-is-my-copilot/
[+] [-] micheljansen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhauer|13 years ago|reply