Show HN: Instantly listen to any URL (per.quest)

"No video with supported format and MIME type found."

Apparently it's serving zero-byte mp3s?

If you want a bookmark:

  javascript:audio=document.createElement('audio');audio.controls=true;audio.autoplay=true;audio.src='https://per.quest/'+document.location.href;audio.style='position:fixed;right:0;top:0;height:revert;z-index:10000;';document.body.appendChild(audio);

This works perfectly:

https://jamesclear.com/five-step-creative-process

Very useful for me to download the filfre articles as mp3 so I will be able to listen to them off line! Thank you!

Neat! Could you add speed controls, a download audio option, download audio as mp3/webm/etc, and options for different voices?

Why is there no donation option for this project?

Why not add a email signup for updates/news?

What are your options for micro monetization?

This is one of the best ideas I have seen this year. This is beautiful.

This is cool! I recently tried to use VoiceOver on my iPhone and it’s… astonishingly difficult to use for just text to speech!

One minor request: I realize the form page itself is very minimal, but this would be much more usable on a phone if you set the font-size of the input to at least 16px, and a reasonable viewport meta tag eg `<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">`

This is timing. I was just looking for a solution for a friend who has very bad eyesight due to accident. They want to be able to listen to news articles and such.

It would be nice if we can choose languages other than English.

Very cool but only seemed to catch the first couple of sentences or paragraph for my test URL..

URL used: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43581122

how is this made?

Very cool! I've made a small prototype of something like this before, but what's always gotten me is the limitations of text to speech.

Hopefully some point soon we will have options for more natural speech.

Once in a while I use the speech feature of Chrome on my MacOS to have it read articles to me while I work. It's clunky though, it only works (AFAIK) on highlighted text which gets annoying on really long articles, and there's no pause so if I want to "pause" I need to stop it and then redo the highlight starting from where I paused (again, annoying with long articles).

I think I'll be using your service from now on! Browser/OS agnostic, no highlighting, and pausing!

Nice to haves: - ability to pick a different voice - playback speed controls - maybe load the original article in an iframe below the player to be able to follow along

  javascript:audio=document.createElement('audio');audio.controls=true;audio.autoplay=true;audio.src='https://per.quest/'+document.location.href;audio.style='position:fixed;right:0;top:0;height:revert;z-index:10000;';audio.onmousemove=(e)=>{audio.playbackRate=e.layerX>150?(e.layerX>250?0.55:0.75):(e.layerX<10?1.3:1);};document.body.appendChild(audio);

Very nice! I tried it out on one of my articles[0] and it worked very well. The only issue I had was that the code samples were spoken. Perhaps ignore <pre> sections?

[0] https://sambhav.saggis.com/en/blog/hashing-data-with-chess

Wow, thanks, I have tried hacking together something that would work like this for playing text posts while I'm driving or working out. Awesome! :)

command-line version:

  curl -L https://per.quest/$URL | mpv - # or aplay etc.

  ffplay https://per.quest/$URL

Great free service by the OP btw. We have a feature similar to this in https://narrationbox.com if you are willing to sign up. Almost all URLs work plus we have more than 300 voices to choose from. Disclosure: I am a cofounder.

I became aware of a chrome extension that does this. Is there anything that the extension does that this can’t do?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speechify-for-chro...

So this had the very useful feature of finding two separate typos in a post that I had spent many hours proofreading. I'll need to remember this.

I feel like this is a great idea, honestly.

But in my opinion I think that you should make the website fully work without the use of client-side JavaScript.

Not that I dislike JavaScript, in fact, I love it. And it's great! But there are several reasons I think that this would make sense doing.

Here is a detailed explanation for "why":

The website already works without the use of client-side JavaScript, only not the index.

If you for example go to: https://per.quest/https://example.com it will work just fine and redirect you to the generated MP3 file.

But if you put https://example.com inside of that input on the website index and have JavaScript disabled it simply won't work. There also is no notice that it does not work without JavaScript enabled.

The solution to this is simple and I think that it would not be hard to change the way you are getting the user given URL from your back-end. What I think would make more sense doing is to just make it work using a URL query parameter.

For example: https://per.quest?url=https://example.com

... which would then allow you to make use of HTML forms, and simply add the "name" attribute to the input with the value set to "url".

So, this would then work in both cases: when the user hit enter and/or pressed a button inside of the form.

Hope that you will agree with me on this!

Is this somehow using the waybackmachine to scrape pages? When I try some of the classic ssrf paths like file:/// or http://localhost:8080, I get audio about the internet archive.

When I put in https://localhost:443, I get audio for the default nginx page, which matches what the internet archive has for that url: https://web.archive.org/web/20210620003533/http://localhost/

But putting http://localhost returns the audio from per.quest's home page.

    fun trySpeaking(str:String){
    
        fun speak(){
            tts?.speak(str, TextToSpeech.QUEUE_FLUSH, null, null)
        }
    
        tts?.also {
            it.stop()
            speak()
        } ?: run {
            tts = TextToSpeech(appContext) { status ->
                println("Speak: $status")
                if (status == TextToSpeech.SUCCESS) {
                    speak()
                }
            }.apply {
                language = Locale.US
            }
        }
    }

stallman.org sounds even better read aloud

Nice.

You can do the same in our iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1535903742

Browse to any page and click on "Listen Now" in the app (including logged in page)

I have something pretty similar that I built some time ago for personal use: listen to articles while I am working on things and can't dedicate my attention to anything else. I've been wondering if I should open source it(shove it all into a docker container that people can use locally). I would have loved to be able to publish it as a service but two things are stopping me: 1 is cost to run this and 2 is potential licensing issues I might face with it. But open source... And it runs pretty smoothly on a CPU(albeit a 14-core xeon and an 11-th gen i7).