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.
Yeah unfortunately there isn't a lot of control over HTML5 audio AFAIK. There is a preload option but it's specific to the individual <audio> element.
Maybe as a hack I could change it so each article has a hidden <audio> somewhere that preloads it in the background, then when you actually play back it should use cache.
I don't know if that's wise over a cell connection though, downloading all the MP3s.
Perhaps a better approach would be to add a "preload" button, and then use the hidden element as you suggested so we aren't loading audio we aren't interested in.
Another idea would be to add a personal user queue to do the same thing. Awesome site btw.
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 actually find that Audio is my favorite way to consume content because I usually want to use my sight and hands to be doing something more proactive and creative (ie. programming)
Perhaps this is unique to myself, but I have found that I can function amazingly well digesting something through Audio and working on something visually. I have no formal neuroscience education, but perhaps it's something to do with how the brain (or perhaps just my brain) processes various inputs and outputs.
As a secondary note to the author of this app. What a great idea! I really like where you guys are going with this. I do find it hard to listen to as the narrator still sounds like a robot. But I'm sure with enough time this will be solved as well.
I can't code and listen to speech audio at the same time. I can do it if I'm only pattern-matching or doing something that is only visual and doesn't take much conscious thought. I used to listen to audiobooks at an old job whenever I had to do tedious work, digging through spreadsheets for anomalous data. And, I now listen to audiobooks while I'm riding my bike or exercising.
I figured that it was because coding, or writing something like this comment, uses the speech center of my brain, as does the incoming audio stream. Music doesn't have any adverse affects on my ability to code or write comments, since I don't really pay attention to any of the vocals that may be present.
As an audiobook fanatic, my go to explanation for audio's effectiveness is that speaking and listening were the human race's primary way of transmitting and receiving information until very recently - the era of most of the human race being literate is a blink in the scale of evolutionary history.
A recent article on audiobooks (in the New Yorker, I think?) cited studies saying that audiobook readers had markedly better recall of physical descriptions in books, presumably because the visual processing centers of the brain aren't occupied with the task of reading itself.
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've pointed them to this thread to see what they think. Look forward to seeing this progress. (And as an aside, I really wish someone would crack the TTS 'uncanny valley' problem 100%. It's a surprisingly difficult problem.)
You're absolutely right about the TTS uncanny valley problem. We're betting on the fact that this is an industry effort. Currently we don't have the resources to really invest in the core TTS technology but always on the look-out for breakthrough/experimental tech.
There's quite a difference between the "normal" voices in OSX, and the high-quality ones. If you have a few spare gigabytes, try out the French, Spanish, and Swedish versions.
For my kids, it's at least a few minutes entertainment to make the computer speak high-quality foreign curse words.
I'd never noticed this before - cool! Samantha and Tom in the US English section sound particularly good.
The only major problem I seem to perceive is that the transitions between certain words and phones aren't smooth enough and are jarring. It doesn't sound like they're far off but I guess 90% of the work is in the last 10% ;-)
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.
Now I feel bad since I used to write the support docs at Apple and I messed up here.
1. Go to Settings then Accessibility. Check that Speak Selection is On.
You can also choose Dialects and set speaking rate or if you want words highlighted as they're speaking.
2. In Pocket app select a body of text by tapping and holding on a text. Selector bars will appear, drag them to the start and the end of an article.
You can do this for anything now, websites, emails, etc. I set my voice to be South African English (since it oddly sounds natural to me) and set my speed at about a little to the left of middle.
I'm a co-founder of the startup that built SoundGecko. But more specifically I had a bigger part in building this "feature" for Hacker News since it's something I actually wanted to use personally.
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 :)
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!
longzheng, is there any way to be able to change articles? I'm on ff19, and clicking on a new article just continues the original article. Hovering over the left side of the article shows the "play" symbol, but clicking anywhere there just continues the original article. Not sure if this is a bug or not.
That's weird. It should definitely switch to the new article if you click the picture/play icon or the title. As a workaround, could you try "up/down" arrows? It's possible the HTML5 audio player in FF19 is buggy.
Yeah, doesn't work on FF19 even with the arrow keys. But it did work on Chrome Canary - must be a bug on FF.
edit: It looks like FF19 is complaining about the content-type: "audio/mpeg" when changing articles. Not sure what one it is using, but it does manage to play the first article only.
Very cool. Now our eyes can get some rest by letting this app read the top posts.
Can we also get to hear the top 2 or 3 comments from the corresponding discussion page ?
I think early on I investigated getting comments for posts but couldn't do it reliably or "say it" in a consistent way that made sense. May add it as a future feature.
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?
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.
87 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadSince 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.
Maybe as a hack I could change it so each article has a hidden <audio> somewhere that preloads it in the background, then when you actually play back it should use cache.
I don't know if that's wise over a cell connection though, downloading all the MP3s.
Another idea would be to add a personal user queue to do the same thing. Awesome site btw.
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.
Perhaps this is unique to myself, but I have found that I can function amazingly well digesting something through Audio and working on something visually. I have no formal neuroscience education, but perhaps it's something to do with how the brain (or perhaps just my brain) processes various inputs and outputs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functio...
As a secondary note to the author of this app. What a great idea! I really like where you guys are going with this. I do find it hard to listen to as the narrator still sounds like a robot. But I'm sure with enough time this will be solved as well.
I figured that it was because coding, or writing something like this comment, uses the speech center of my brain, as does the incoming audio stream. Music doesn't have any adverse affects on my ability to code or write comments, since I don't really pay attention to any of the vocals that may be present.
A recent article on audiobooks (in the New Yorker, I think?) cited studies saying that audiobook readers had markedly better recall of physical descriptions in books, presumably because the visual processing centers of the brain aren't occupied with the task of reading itself.
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..)
PS: the codename of the backend that powers all this is actually "tldr" since I can't be stuffed reading :)
You're absolutely right about the TTS uncanny valley problem. We're betting on the fact that this is an industry effort. Currently we don't have the resources to really invest in the core TTS technology but always on the look-out for breakthrough/experimental tech.
For my kids, it's at least a few minutes entertainment to make the computer speak high-quality foreign curse words.
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20082143-263/how-to-ins...
The only major problem I seem to perceive is that the transitions between certain words and phones aren't smooth enough and are jarring. It doesn't sound like they're far off but I guess 90% of the work is in the last 10% ;-)
Are you guys using some kind of proprietary solution? Sounds really clear.
My startup has licensed some premium text-to-speech engines for a pretty penny so you get what you pay for!
Basically it reads text to speech of each article on the front page of HN. Kinda like Hacker News Radio almost.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298369
- Automated text-to-speech radio of Hacker News front page's links.
- Listen instead of reading.
See it here http://tldr.io/tldrs/50fe8b4c8aa388171700184f/soundgecko-hac...
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.
1. Go to Settings then Accessibility. Check that Speak Selection is On.
You can also choose Dialects and set speaking rate or if you want words highlighted as they're speaking.
2. In Pocket app select a body of text by tapping and holding on a text. Selector bars will appear, drag them to the start and the end of an article.
You can do this for anything now, websites, emails, etc. I set my voice to be South African English (since it oddly sounds natural to me) and set my speed at about a little to the left of middle.
It's a cool service. Right now, I send articles to Pocket so it can be read to me.
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.
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 :)
Just sayin' :)
edit: It looks like FF19 is complaining about the content-type: "audio/mpeg" when changing articles. Not sure what one it is using, but it does manage to play the first article only.
[1]http://superuser.com/questions/519649/tool-to-bulk-speed-up-...
Please fix a spelling on your frontpage: s/excecrise/exercise
Shameless plug of an old, but related, blog post: http://mindtrove.info/my-ipad-is-my-copilot/
Shameless plug of an old, but related, blog post: http://mindtrove.info/my-ipad-is-my-copilot/
EDIT: And, How to get this the hacker-news as my Soundgecko channel?