
Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio - tiburon
https://websitevoice.com
======
mindwork
If this is not a wake up call for me, I don't know what it should be. I had
this same exact idea for 9 months now but never moved to execute. Reading
through site it even has the same wording as in my head.

As a developer I wanted to build something like this and it looks easy(without
AI part). But following the startup gurus and podcasts I figured that idea
should be validated first and to find actual customers is more important than
building technology. Here started troubles. I have no skills in marketing and
when diving deeper it looked cumbersome for me. I spend free credits on
AdSense but it only brought 8 emails for empty newsletter.

I'm interested did you do the research on user base? What would be a market
for this?

Where are you planning to grow the site? Do you have monetization plan?

p.s. found a link in comments for read2me.online, and just from demo they
sound really good for ears

~~~
bbody
Likewise, I spent a day building a proof of concept but lost interest after.

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SeaDude
Hello, Very interesting. I've been using Edge's built-in voice reading a lot
more recently for the exact case you mention on your homepage: listening while
working. I have two questions for you after reading your TOS and Privacy
Policy. I was expecting to see "you" scraping data from each site or otherwise
monetizing the service, but nothing stood out. Either your TOS/PP is
incorrect, or you don't have an obvious income stream for the service you are
rendering.

So the questions: Who are you? and How are you doing this for free?

Thank you,

~~~
tiburon
why it really matters on who I am? I'm a developer with passion to help people
listen to podcasts and the idea was simple. How can I offer it for free? I do
a lot of work to make it happen, there will be a premium version with more
features which are being cooked with the help of many developers who loved the
idea too.

~~~
timClicks
It matters because one of your potential customers thinks it matters. And
presumably because services without a business model don't have a long future.

~~~
tiburon
timClicks that is not true, there are many products out there that do not rely
on capitals, It does not matter who I am personally. The service is free of
charge until we cannot make it free of charge anymore for whatever reason. We
are focusing now on user's feedbacks who already added the widget. you can
find more answers on our business model there.
[https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/finished-mvp-to-turn-
blog...](https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/finished-mvp-to-turn-blogs-to-
podcasts-with-ai-what-do-you-think-06553ca565)

------
sebastienrocks
There are some UI issues from what I noticed:

At small breakpoints, the UI (especially the "try it now" button) can overlap
some text. Sizing also seems off.

Another issue I noticed is the play button itself, the entire circle area is
clickable, however only the play/pause icon can actually be clicked.

There are also numerous accessibility issues. If you're going to advertise
this as something to improve accessibility, it might be good to actually
concentrate on that for your landing page.

I do hope the UI can be improved, as the product looks solid.

------
tiburon
I'm not here to pitch the idea to make people like it, if you do not like it,
be constructive on a given problem. To get a feeling more on how it feels on a
blog here is an example: [https://websitevoice.com/blog/text-to-speech-
dyslexia-and-re...](https://websitevoice.com/blog/text-to-speech-dyslexia-and-
reading-disabilities/)

if the solution does not appeal to you, it surely appeals to others.

~~~
suyash
Couldn't listen to it for more than 20 seconds, got quite robotic and monotone
for me. This would be like flash and auto play videos, cool at first then most
annoying thing ever created.

~~~
princess445
monotone? hahaha you should try the default text to speech from the operating
system to see what is monotone

------
t3ra
[https://read2me.online](https://read2me.online) Another similar service

~~~
mindwork
Pricing looks expensive, but quality is top notch. Do you know which TTS
engine it is?

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skilled
This looks -- and sounds! -- awesome. I'm not sure if this can compete with
Schema's 'Speakable' [1] property (for smart speakers), but for mobile/web
browsing this looks amazing.

Looking forward to seeing new developments and also the pricing plan
eventually.

1: [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-
types/speakab...](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-
types/speakable)

------
tiburon
We created this free web app to convert articles to high-quality audio. Our
mission is to help people with learning disabilities, those who prefer
listening over reading, and who are always on the go to enjoy consuming your
content online. Please give it a try and let us now what you think. Your
feedback is highly appreciated :)

~~~
jamil7
I'm working on a project that overlaps slightly (only with this feature).
Would you be open to offering programmatic access in the future via an API?.

~~~
mindwork
@jamil7 what are you working on? I wrote here that I've had pretty similar
idea, wonder what's your take on that?

~~~
jamil7
@mindwork DM me if you feel like it be cool to hear what you're working on.

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nzealand
I added it to an old unused part of my website.

[https://www.folj.com/lateral-solutions/](https://www.folj.com/lateral-
solutions/)

Apparently my javascript doesn't play nicely with programmatically injected
elements. The Show All Solutions button still works.

~~~
tiburon
good, at least you powered your blog with voice. happy to see it useful for
you.

------
superfrank
Just some hopefully constructive criticism, I found the voice used on the
"Smart Natural Voice" section to be the most robotic sounding of them all.
Specifically, the "Say goodbye to robotic voice, this is nothing like you ever
heard before." line sounded very robotic and a bit awkward.

I'm not sure if maybe the content of the copy is a little clunky or if it's
the voice itself, but that section sounded worse than the other ones, IMO. If
possible, I would think about toying with that. The girl's voice in the "Voice
Pitch and Speed Control" section sounded far more natural and impressive.

------
voltagex_
Can I use this to convert other articles? Could I pay to get 32kbit Opus?

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jamieweb
Do you have plans to publish a versioned release with support for Subresource
Integrity?

Also, is there somewhere that the following is documented?

\- Required origins for each type of content so that this can be compatible
with a Content-Security-Policy

\- Required use of browser features so that this can be made compatible with a
Feature-Policy

\- Commitments from yourself that the lists of required origins/features will
not be added to without prior notice, in order to give time for blog operators
to update their headers accordingly

Thanks

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tibbon
I’ve wondered for a while with NPR doesn’t have both audio and text of all of
their programs.

Sometimes I can listen, but not read (driving). Sometimes, I can read but not
listen (work, or just when I’m without headphones). I realize they want high
quality voice, but if at the moment all they have is text that’s ok with me.
Not having both of these often means I just skip that article and never come
back to it

~~~
ramblerman
radio ambulante (NPR's spanish podcast) has full transcripts in english and
spanish of all their content. The quality of the journalism and topics are
outstanding as well.

Super useful for learning Spanish.

------
andy_ppp
Amazon Polly [1] and Google Text to Speech [2] are unfortunately far superior.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/polly/](https://aws.amazon.com/polly/)

[2] [https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/](https://cloud.google.com/text-
to-speech/)

~~~
hellojason
I have to agree, plus they’re free for what most users would need.

Also noteworthy is the official Amazon Polly for WordPress plugin -
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-
polly/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-polly/)

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baroffoos
Don't have time to test it now. How does it sound? Is it better than the
robotic text to speech voice we all know? Wonder if you can run this offline
so you can save the files when you build your static site and no scripts are
required on the frontend.

~~~
txtme
The actual text to voice synthesis isn't acutally bad, but the audio quality
is terrible. The audio artifacts are so bad I could barely listen to the demo
snippets. It's too bad they ruined a quite good product by skimping on the
most important quality, audio quality.

I wonder how OP missed this? Audio quality has to be flawless when using
headphones for extended times. It's not like you need a lot of bits for audio,
so it's not something you save on.

Please fix!

~~~
mholt
Sounds good on my speakers

~~~
txtme
Headphones.

------
txtme
You should showcase your product better.

Add a text input box so that prospective users can try it themselves.

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PapaSlug
Typo: "We use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to constantly
improve our voice algorithms to make your website text-to-speech is as
realistic as possible."

~~~
tiburon
Thanks PapaSlug, i like your username. The Typo is fixed now.

------
dbetteridge
Constructive criticism , I could not find any samples of the audio on your
site.

Recommendation, add the plugin to your own homepage for potential users to
test it out before having to signup.

~~~
tiburon
thanks for the input:

there is a demo button here on this page where you enable your website. You
can even test the feature without signup.

[https://websitevoice.com/convert-text-to-audio-
free](https://websitevoice.com/convert-text-to-audio-free)

~~~
dbetteridge
Apologies, looks like your widget domain is being blocked by my work and was
preventing the demo button from doing anything.

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meetbryce
What's the catch? How are you providing this for free.

~~~
kseo3l
according to what he said on another thread it will be free and it will have
some paid features on top

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edent
Is there a demo of the UK voice anywhere? I could only find the American one.

Very impressed with the audio quality. What's the revenue model?

~~~
krackers
>Very impressed with the audio quality

To me it sounds not much better than Google's standard wavenet TTS (seen here:
[https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-
speech/)) which is admittedly pretty state of the art but nowhere as good as
actual human dictation.

------
kentich
I use Read Aloud Firefox extension to listen to blog posts.

