
Show HN: Polly Podcast – Listen to blog posts at work - Ryel
https://pollypodcast.com
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Ryel
Hey HN,

I’ve been working on Polly Podcast for a few months and I’m excited to share
it with the community. I made this so that I could listen to articles while at
work or during my commute.

Once I got into building the platform I found this incredible voice synthesis
community in NYC, which led me to Recess Labs[0], which is where I am now
while I work on building my own voice model based on the recent Tacotron 2
paper[1].

Would love feedback and I’m happy to answer any questions or talk about voice-
tech.

[0] [http://www.recesslabs.com/](http://www.recesslabs.com/) [1]
[https://research.googleblog.com/2017/12/tacotron-2-generatin...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/12/tacotron-2-generating-
human-like-speech.html)

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eejdoowad
Great work. It’s a pleasure to use. A few questions:

1\. Have you heard of Narro (narro.co)? It does the same thing, but it’s been
around longer and has many integrations.

2\. Can you share the tech stack currently powering your voice synthesis?
Since it’s called PollyPodcast, are you currently using AWS Polly for TTS?

3\. Is this something you intend to monetize?

4\. It seems like you offer unlimited readings for free. Do you have an abuse
prevention strategy? This could become a hole in your wallet if you’re paying
for a charged-per-character TTS service.

5\. Creating custom voices is a great differentiator. What are some problems
you have to solve to create them and how is this effort progressing? Do you
have quality and performance goals?

~~~
Ryel
Thanks for the feedback. Great questions!

1\. Narro is really, really, great.

2\. The app itself is on Rails with AWS Polly transcribing most of the
requests. x% of the transcriptions are routed to a Flask API that runs a
neural TTS engine + with token-based SSML rolling out slowly for some heavy-
users.

3\. I have no plans to monetize Polly Podcast.

4\. Unlimited readings.

5\. I'm working now with large publishers to figure out what the costs look
like to generate new synthetic voices at scale. Hope to release this publicly
as soon as I get the go-ahead.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out in email =]

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fiftyacorn
Great work - It would make a great wordpress plugin on websites

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angellisadolan
This is perfect for listening to articles while running or commuting!

Pretty cool product.

