
New Pocket is here - dbosch
https://getpocket.com/blog/2018/10/introducing-the-new-pocket/
======
yeutterg
I've been playing with the new text-to-speech features, and they are SO much
better than before (at least on Android). The new podcast-like audio interface
is smooth enough that you could use this safely while driving, walking, or
otherwise commuting. I am a heavy audiobook listener, and this is finally a
viable option for catching up on articles that I want to read passively.

I thought the old voices were fine, both on Android and iOS. The new ones are
from the Amazon Polly API (according to
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/11/17961564/pocket-
redesign...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/11/17961564/pocket-redesign-
listening-amazon-polly)). Between the two schemes, I think you trade off
performance/battery (old TTS system) life with data usage (new version).

The new voices are maybe a little more natural sounding, but the pauses
between sentences were better with the old Android voices, IMO. It looks like
it will still use the system TTS engine when there's no data connection. This
is cool, and I hope they make further improvements in the TTS area!

Seeking forward and backward left a lot to be desired on the old version. It
skipped by paragraph, which worked but was not great since different articles
have different paragraph lengths. In the app, you can now skip back and
forward 15 seconds, which is more natural.

Unfortunately, on my Bluetooth headphones, skipping backward goes to the
previous article, not back 15 seconds. They really need to have this as an
option, because even with ANC headphones (Sony WH-1000XM2) sometimes you miss
things due to loud noises or inattention, and you just want to listen to the
last sentence or so. Audible and Google Play Books have this little feature
that makes a huge difference.

Funny enough, I had a side project that was supposed to be a TTS-focused
reading app, because I wasn't satisfied with the options from Pocket and
Instapaper at the time. I built out the backend using a couple AWS Lambda
Functions written in Node.js:

\- One to strip an article to unformatted text only using the Mercury Web
Parser API ([https://mercury.postlight.com/web-
parser/](https://mercury.postlight.com/web-parser/)) and to do some additional
cleanup. Text was saved in DynamoDB

\- One to synthesize the text with Amazon Polly and save to S3. This was to be
done when the user wanted to listen, not when the user saved the text article,
to reduce costs

\- One for streaming the article. This was where I left off. The idea would
have been to get it to stream and sync up across your life, such as being able
to pause on your phone then pick up on your Google Home or Amazon Echo. I
never got around to writing any of the apps for the individual platforms, as I
was focused on another project.

It's great to see Pocket create an almost-perfect listening app, so now I can
focus on other stuff I want to do.

