
Show HN: Built a Hacker News radio web app I can listen to - longzheng
http://soundgecko.com/station/hacker-news
======
petercooper
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..)

~~~
longzheng
Yeah I came across tldr.io the other day and really like the concept. Would
_love_ an introduction.

PS: the codename of the backend that powers all this is actually "tldr" since
I can't be stuffed reading :)

~~~
petercooper
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.)

~~~
jstclair
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.

[http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20082143-263/how-to-
ins...](http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20082143-263/how-to-install-and-
use-mac-os-x-lions-high-quality-speech-voices/)

~~~
petercooper
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% ;-)

------
longzheng
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.

Let me know of any suggestions.

~~~
ekurutepe
Is the audio streamed over cellular? It would be cool to preload clips over
WiFi before hitting the road.

~~~
longzheng
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.

~~~
jpalacios
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.

------
shaunxcode
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?).

~~~
bryans
That's pretty much what Umano is doing. I'm not sure how they decide which
articles get read though.

<http://umanoapp.com/>

~~~
shaunxcode
Interesting, I just installed it and the few random articles I listened to
appeared to be using TTS still? Maybe I got unlucky.

------
dvoiss
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.

~~~
BinaryBullet
I created a bookmarklet the other day. It doesn't work on all links, but I
just tested it on a CNN article, and it worked.

Anyways, here it is (YMMV):

<https://gist.github.com/4596293>

------
eumenides1
Awesome work.

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
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?

EDIT2: It got it! Awesome!

------
jval
Wow, amazing work. I too was skeptical about TTS but it really grows on you.

Are you guys using some kind of proprietary solution? Sounds really clear.

~~~
longzheng
Glad you're pleasantly surprised. You'll probably come across a few oddities
sooner or later.

My startup has licensed some premium text-to-speech engines for a pretty penny
so you get what you pay for!

------
iambot
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

------
goostavos
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.

------
drcode
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.

------
yitchelle
Great concept.

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
We (SoundGecko team) are based in Australia :)

Definitely going down this path in terms of offline support.

------
sunwooz
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/>)

------
DiabloD3
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.

~~~
longzheng
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 :)

~~~
danenania
Could you integrate Readability or a similar service? Then the hard work of
parsing out the meat of the page would be done for you.

------
dreen
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!

------
ivabz
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?

------
alaskamiller
Pretty cool in itself. Good demo of SoundGecko too.

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
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.

~~~
alaskamiller
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.

------
slajax
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.

~~~
slajax
Still very cool though! Good job.

------
po84
Very nice concept. I hadn't heard of SoundGecko. I'll need to check it out.

Shameless plug of an old, but related, blog post: <http://mindtrove.info/my-
ipad-is-my-copilot/>

------
micheljansen
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!

------
bhauer
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.

------
longzheng
Forgot protip: you can also use up/down arrows and spacebar for play/pause.

------
tersiag
Hi, this is a great idea, perfect for when I'm in transit. It would be nice if
you could add a feature to control the speed of the voice. The output is way
too slow for my liking

------
ntsh
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 ?

~~~
longzheng
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.

------
cpursley
I've been waiting for this tech for years. The TTS is really not bad. Is this
the same product interviewed on This Week In Startups a few weeks ago?

------
eranation
I would have paid someone 20$ a month (and I'm sure more will), to humanly
read top HN posts, and summarize them. Kind of like tldr.io + audible.

~~~
miles
Let the folks at Umano know - they've already got humans reading a bunch of
tech news: <http://umanoapp.com/>

------
dannyr
Did you build SoundGecko or you built a Hacker News channel on SoundGecko?

It's a cool service. Right now, I send articles to Pocket so it can be read to
me.

~~~
longzheng
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.

------
brador
Is there anything like this as an API which takes a paragraph of text and
returns an audio file TTS read out of the text?

~~~
hnoob
tts-api.com does exactly that (text-to-MP3).

------
pknerd
Amazing! Wish it was a bit more smooth but heck, still acceptable!

Now I can code as well as _listening_ Hacker News.

------
hello_newman
This is awesome! I am way more auditory than visual. You have saved me so much
time!

------
andreasklinger
It's down. Does anyone have a cached version or short TL;DR what i am missing
out ?

~~~
jval
Seems to be up for me still.

Basically it reads text to speech of each article on the front page of HN.
Kinda like Hacker News Radio almost.

~~~
longzheng
Yeah. Came across Hacker News Radio before but the domain has since expired.
Anyone know who was behind it?

~~~
omaranto
A quick search revealed it was Hacker News user JSig.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298369>

------
pw7
Great Work! Aside from a few glitches this is fantastic! TTS is surprisingly
fine.

------
mcclanahoochie
and if you want all of your Google Reader feeds read to you ...
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.feedspeakp...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.feedspeakpro)

------
todd3834
I wish this were done with voice bunny, but I realize it would get expensive.

------
hnoob
Really nice and useful work, longzheng! If you like these kind of services and
want to be able to convert any RSS feed (not just HN) into a TTS-spoken
podcast, check out the somewhat similar site podcastomatic.com. I use it to
kill my daily commute by listening to TTS-spoken blogs :)

------
jobigoud
Would be great to be able to variate the audio speed.

~~~
longzheng
We investigated this. Unfortunately HTML5 audio (especially mobile devices)
doesn't offer a lot of capability in that regards.

~~~
a_m0d
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.

~~~
longzheng
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.

~~~
a_m0d
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.

------
jakozaur
Nice!

Please fix a spelling on your frontpage: s/excecrise/exercise

------
hamey
Love it. You guys are AWESOME!

------
orlandob
This is amazing. Thank you.

------
locksley
Is this a YC startup?

~~~
longzheng
We applied but never got in :P

------
jlengrand
I love you.

Just sayin' :)

~~~
longzheng
The feeling is mutual. :)

