HN Explorer

Ask HN: Would you use a service that sent you customized spoken information?

11 points by KennethMyers ↗ HN
I'm an American currently on a teaching fellowship at a university in the Philippines. I'm surrounded by people who are sharp and computer savvy with excellent English and pretty accents.

I want to make something for myself, and I'd like to know if it has broader appeal.

An MP3 is recorded in the daytime here, and if you're in the US you receive it at 5am. It runs like this:

"Hi Ken, this is Patti, It's Monday, May 19th. Bitcoin is up a dollar since yesterday, and your blog kind of had a minor spike yesterday when a lot of people shared the "Why God Hates German Words" post on twitter. Ray Kurzweil's Google News share went up because he announced a new book. The Syrian rebels took over an airport. Your mom's birthday is next week, and you have that stupid meeting tomorrow at six. Remember to bring the file for Deogracia. Ani Difranco's new album comes out on Friday. Another Emirati professorship posted on higheredjobs.com, but it doesn't say anything about family housing. It's supposed to be sunny today with a high of 85. Have a good one, dude."

I would kill for this, and it would be easy to configure some web scraping scripts that gave Patti crib notes for making these MP3s so she didn't have to do a lot of manual web browsing. I can imagine holding the phone to my head after my alarm went off an being totally energized and ready to get up after listening to something like this, and my friends over here, even professor friends, think it would be a laughably good deal to get a dollar per recording. I figure I could charge $2 and turn a profit.

Does this sound to the veteran entrepreneurs on HN like something that a wider audience might be interested in? Is there something I haven't thought of that would make it incredibly stupid to try? Any other thoughts or suggestions?

24 comments

[ 273 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] thread
ams6110
I would not use something like this. I prefer written information. Easier to refer to again if I want to remind myself of one or two points out of the entire content.

I also don't like the trend of posting programming "how-tos" as videos.

aaronsnoswell
I feel like this is what Siri / Google Now will / should be doing in the next year or so...
thomasbk
You'd charge $2/day? I think $60/month would seem quite expensive for an audio version of daily reminder text.

I also think this is a feature, not a product? Unless you perhaps make it a text-to-actual-speech API?

KennethMyers
Probably a good point. The price point just may not be feasible. Thanks for your input!
eru
It might still be worthwhile starting the venture, just to see where demand lies. I bet you'll stumble upon a successful formula that way.
KennethMyers
I think I should. I think I should do this with my craziest friends and see what comes of it. Maybe word of mouth will get us the requisite numbers to make some money. Maybe we'll just at least have what we wanted for ourselves. Why not, right? It's like zero overhead. Thanks for your encouragement.
eru
I just moved to Singapore a few months ago and have just gone through the (very efficient) motions of registering a business. I am still toiling away at the day job, but send me an email if you are interested in further discussion. My address is in my profile.
angersock
Totally feasible, but it'd probably have to talk dirty too.

(For you Something Positive fans: "It's like Nerdrotica meets New Relic" )

(oh god thats amazing)

KennethMyers
Patti would talk dirty to me. And so would Lorna. And they're hot. That, and the fact that I know and love these people, might be the reason I was over-optimistic about the price point.
eru
For a thought experiment, think what you could do at much higher price point (e.g. 100$ a day), and who might pay for that. Then scale down from there.
angersock
I was actually thinking about this.

Basically, do a thing like this for egotistical investors and bankers--how many do you think would pay large amounts of money just to enjoy having somebody read them the closing bell and after-market action on their stocks?

Shit, you could put together a basic portfolio tracker and script generator, and then just farm it out to spare VA talent.

Anybody interested in doing this?

eru
Virtual girlfriend leaves personalized erotic messages?
angersock
See, that's entirely too sad for me.

( SaaS => sadness as a service )

C1D
$60 is not worth it. I can get this stuff from my RSS Reader and twitter feed, plus then I would be able to re-read what parts I want.
jpasden
I had the exact same thoughts as thomasbk, although I have to admit that it does sound kind of cool. No way I would pay $2 or even $1 per day for it, though. Roughly $10 per month sounds reasonable.

I think you'd find that assembling all the right data (which is the true product) is way more work than you imagine. Sure, you could probably do it for yourself with a doable amount of work, but to be able to do it for ANYONE is a massive undertaking. And... yeah, you probably don't want to try to build Google Now.

KennethMyers
Thanks for your thoughts. The one thing I'd have over Google Now is that I wouldn't be trying to anticipate people's information needs; they could just give me a list of a hundred things to check. Setting them up might take an hour per customer, and that would be labor that was plainly bet in the hopes of continued business. If people wanted to change things all the time, that would, in fact, be a nightmare. And I don't think anyone, even in a cheap country like the Philippines, would be excited about their share of $10 a month. So it looks like there are a bunch of insurmountable cons.

Maybe this is something I should just pitch to friends. I could handle the scripting load for 30 people, and 30 customers is $900 a month.

eru
You might be able to go much cheaper, if you managed to share audio between customers. Very personalised information wouldn't work. But you could e.g. tag your service on something like Pocket (getpocket.com). I already queue up articles on pocket to read later, and I can imagine paying for some of them to be read out to me instead. (I don't know about the legal situation about reading out someone else's content, though.)
tekacs
> Very personalised information wouldn't work.

I have a built and working version of something not far off what the OP describes, only for myself (haven't had time to open source it or add a config interface) but that uses snippets of my own voice (for reminders) as well as Twilio's text-to-speech API to generate these messages (partially due to its providence as an alarm - TTS + avconv + e-mail would work for those who didn't want that).

I've had to custom build the generators (templated text + scraping code using utilities) for each data source, but it's not much of a chore and indeed a one-time task. I write these by hand mainly because I think it's valuable to have audible cues (provided by the surrounding template) when hearing particular information and code + template makes conciseness easy, too (cf. IFTTT).

I've thought in passing about the fact that people might appreciate its use, but I've felt inclined towards open source rather than subscription, at least in part because I haven't necessarily the time to make it configurable for the non-technical.

I suppose throwing humans into the mix, as you suggest, would help with that. :)

KennethMyers
I've got some systems in play for myself too :) There's definitely something in this noospheric vicinity that people want.
eru
Have you ever heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk?
tekacs
Thanks for the thought - good call.

All I'd worry about is proper distribution of tasks to alleviate privacy concerns.

Also, I'm not in the US, but shrug to that. ;)

pbreit
Be careful what you consider "easy" or a "laughably good deal". Like all ideas of this nature, the hardest part is coing to be getting users. And at $2 per [listen/day?], you've made that challenge significantly more difficult.

Also, have a look at http://anten.na which aggregates and organizes short news and other MP3 genres.