
Show HN: Top HN articles in human-read podcast format - ksaitor
Hi HN,<p>Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them.<p>So I thought it&#x27;d be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts.
Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I&#x27;ll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1]<p>We are starting out by narrating top articles from HN and some longer cryptocurrency white-papers. Giving away 3 top articles from last week and we’ll be sending one more audio article weekly.<p>In future and at scale, we’d love to narrate any article or a document, on demand and with only a few hours turnaround time.<p>Would love your feedback!
What type of content would you like us to narrate?
Is it easy to access the podcast feed?<p>Thanks!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;readbyhumans.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;readbyhumans.com</a>
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x1798DE
Have you thought about the rights situation here? I don't see anything that
indicates that you secured the copyright of the articles you've already
provided, and the sites themselves don't have any copyleft notices. I suspect
that unless you have ongoing relationships with authors, it's unlikely that
you'll be able to both respect their copyrights and turn around "any article
or document" in "a few hours turnaround time".

~~~
andrewstuart2
I'm interested to see what the legal ramifications would be here. I don't see
anybody objecting to a screenreader reading the content they have created. So
what's the difference between that and a better-inflected human voice? Even
with the screen reader, people have probably essentially paid to have
copyrighted content read aloud.

So what's the difference?

~~~
gary_bernhardt
Here's one huge difference:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14550931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14550931)

(Specifically, this site is depriving me of income.)

------
dharness
Seems like everyone here, even me, has had this idea -- but to my knowledge
you are the only one to do it, so props for that!

The person doing the reading has kind of a funny way of reading it no? Bit of
an accent, odd emphasis, lack of emotion, robotic style.

My opinion is that I won't use it with this narrator, but with a better, more
practiced english orator I would.

~~~
mercer
I suspect many of us who had this idea figured it would be copyright
infringement, and solving that issue, especially in a morally non-ambiguous
way would be difficult. At least that was it for me.

~~~
gary_bernhardt
Likewise. I've thought about doing this for years, especially since there are
so many great works that are rarely read. Now I'm afraid that it'll be haunted
by the specter of the time when someone did it and infringed my commercial
work and I yelled at them for it.

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nstart
Had the same idea some time ago but did not have the same level of motivation
that you did :D. Lots of kudos. One question I wondered about was the
copyright perspective especially in on demand readings. An idea I had was to
sell the service to publications. So maybe that's something you'd like to try
in the future :).

~~~
readbyhumans
Thanks, nstart! Well, just validating an idea, and trying to find a niche with
ton of demand.

I did try out to sell this as a service to publications a few weeks back, but
it seemed like a sales cycle would be way too long and that was not exactly
solving my own problem, so I was not as motivated to continues talking to
publications. Maybe I'll get back to that later.

I talked to 3 lawyers so far. There are ways to making it work. One way it to
set up revenue share with all parties, which is ton of effort, ofc. Another
one it to sell the service as a personal narration service, and not as a audio
content itself. It seems to be a thin line, and I'm still diving into the
details of that. One way or another there seems to be a way to make everyone
happy and avoid legal issues. In my opinion, it's mainly a matter of demand.
If the demand is high enough for such service, and opportunity is big, then
it'll justify efforts, no matter how hard, to make this work.

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purpleidea
Some have said this is copyright infringement. Gary claimed so as well. Keep
in mind, AFAIK, he is not a lawyer. (Neither am I) but ask your own! There are
fair use laws, and especially if you created a trans-formative work, this
could be legal! Good luck.

I'm personally un-sympathetic to Gary's plight to keep his work super secret.
This feeling started when I found out that he asks conference organizers to
NOT share the recordings of talks he gives. I'm not sure how often this has
happened, but it feels against the spirit of presenting against these events.

If I've gotten something wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me, but those
are the facts as I see them today.

~~~
gary_bernhardt
When I accept an invitation to speak at a conference, I say "Yes, but I don't
want to you to publish a video. If that's OK, then I'm in." Also, you may not
realize this, but a _lot_ of conferences are for-profit. It's not as if I'm
tricking them by springing that constraint on them after the fact, and many of
them are making money from the speakers' free labor to begin with.

Second, many _many_ people have tried to build screencasting businesses. One
of them turned into an 800 lb gorilla. Most of the rest don't exist any more.
AFAIK, DAS was the second subscription-based screencasting company to exist,
with the only prior art being a short-lived subscription option offered by
TekPub (which was later acquired by the 800 lb gorilla). DAS still exists
today, is still independent, and is still (almost) my only source of income,
while dozens or maybe hundreds of others have come and gone. I'm sorry if you
don't like the way I exercise control over my wholly-owned works, but my
business model combined with control over my content has allowed me to do this
successfully for six years (modulo a very long break in the middle). And I've
never charged money for anything recorded at a conference; that wouldn't feel
right.

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lucb1e
I started doing this a while back, too! However, I noticed recording takes way
more time than I thought it would, and I didn't think I'd be able to keep up
with the workload every day. The plan was always to involve the community and
different readers, but I'd have to get it started: build a contributors
website, do quality control, read stuff myself, etc. It never happened.

Would it help if I contribute a few articles a week? My twitter handle is the
same as my username, or see my profile for email.

~~~
ksaitor
Thanks, Luc! Definitely, would love to collaborate! Will shoot you an email in
a few min. Thanks for your support.

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reustle
If you like these audio article concepts, check out SpokenLayer. They work
with many big publishers.

[http://www.spokenlayer.com](http://www.spokenlayer.com)

~~~
ksaitor
Thanks, @reustle! I discovered them some time ago. They seem to be doing a
good job. Still a bit different from what I'm trying to do. The problem that
I'm trying to solve is: tons of written content that I'd like to read, yet I
don't have enough time to read it. So basically I'm trying to make a human
screenreader. And trying to find the best way to make it happen :)

Thanks for sharing spokenlayer.com again. Good to know people are familiar
with them!

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chx
o_O really? I must be living in the wrong universe. I often wish there were
less tutorial videos, podcasts and such and just give me the text. I read much
better than listen. Must be me. There's also of course the language barrier
although I did get a 8 out of 9 on my IELTS for understanding spoken English
and I live in British Columbia for some years now -- but then again, reading
comprehension was 8.5 and to this day I have no clue where I lost that half
point.

------
kyawzawwin
Nice work, Raman. I have one question and 1 feature feedback.

How would you scale this up when there are more demands if the product needs
real human to read every article? Maybe that can be your business model
(commercial reading for private podcasts) - there will be copyright issue
though

One feature I think useful for me is that it should be searchable (by voice
command is best) and read it from there instead of listening the whole
article.

~~~
ksaitor
Scaling is doable. We are relying on real human speech at that moment.

Search — that's an interesting idea. That will probably come in a bit later,
when there is tons of demand and we'll be able to pour efforts in all the
latest AI q'n'a tech :D

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bayonetz
Had a similar idea once upon a time to auto narrate any article using text-to-
speech. Got about as far as you did it sounds like. Having human narration
seems so plausible if you approached gig style. Between-work actors could read
for you instead of driving for Lyft.

~~~
ksaitor
Exactly! How long do you think it'll take for TTS AI to catch up and be
indistinguishable from human tone and voice?

Yeah, would be great to turn this into "next million jobs", where anyone can
go and narrate content.

I'm still figuring out what community to target. Where people would love to
listen to that kind of content. What do you think?

~~~
bayonetz
Our intended market was business/enterprise users wanting listen to briefs,
articles, etc. like on their morning commute.

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reustle
If anyone wants to do something similar to this in the command line (simple
article text to audio) I have a little one line shell script here. Put the
text inside article.txt and then run it. Mac only.

[https://gist.github.com/reustle/7029e02e171f8a4b13d0](https://gist.github.com/reustle/7029e02e171f8a4b13d0)

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pacavaca
So, is it actually "by humans" or it's a synthesized speech? Just wondering,
sounds a bit robotic :)

~~~
ksaitor
Humans. Perhaps the accent makes it sound robotic :) If you listen to the full
article versions in your podcast app, you'll notice the difference.

Several people asked this question so far. It's fascinating that people doubt
and not sure whether it's AI or person :D

------
shnraj
Great idea! And I like that it comes straight to my email. Can multitask and
listen at 2x speed!

~~~
ksaitor
Thanks, shnraj! What type of content would you like to be narrated?

------
andreyazimov
Interesting idea. What articles did you narrated so far?

~~~
ksaitor
Thanks, Andrey! We've narrated a few top articles from last week:

\- Options vs. cash. By Dan Luu link — [1][2]

\- College ROI. By Erik Rood link - [3][4]

\- Network protocols. For programmers who know at least one programming
language. by Gary Bernhardt - [5][6]

And the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto.
[https://readbyhumans.com/doc/bitcoin-a-peer-to-peer-
electron...](https://readbyhumans.com/doc/bitcoin-a-peer-to-peer-electronic-
cash-system-xr462736y)

[1] [https://danluu.com/startup-options/](https://danluu.com/startup-options/)

[2] [https://readbyhumans.com/doc/options-vs-
cash-40ncs6z7q](https://readbyhumans.com/doc/options-vs-cash-40ncs6z7q)

[3]
[http://erikrood.com/Posts/college_roi_.html](http://erikrood.com/Posts/college_roi_.html)

[4] [https://readbyhumans.com/doc/college-
roi-9jyu8a764](https://readbyhumans.com/doc/college-roi-9jyu8a764)

[5] [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/compendium/network-
protoc...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/compendium/network-
protocols?share_key=97d3ba4c24d21147)

[6] [https://readbyhumans.com/doc/network-protocols-for-
programme...](https://readbyhumans.com/doc/network-protocols-for-programmers-
who-know-at-least-one-programming-language-09hkyzspi)

~~~
gary_bernhardt
I posted a copyrighted work on Destroy All Software, which offers paid
subscriptions to that same work. You found a link designed to be shared as a
sample and decided to copy my commercial work in full, on your website, behind
your own login wall. You didn't ask first, or even tell me that you'd done it.

Links to that work convert into paying customers, which is how I buy food and
pay my mortgage. You're not only infringing on my copyrighted work, but also
depriving my small business of revenue. Remove the infringing copy of my work
from your site immediately.

~~~
ksaitor
Hi, Gary. Content removed, as requested. Appreciate your patience!

Please understand me. No harm intended.

I just launched this to test an idea. And a lot of people seem to have a
similar demand for this type of narration service. I'm not exactly sure how to
make this happen, but i'm just testing an idea.

If you were building a service that solved this problem (way too much written
content, not time to read, so let's listen instead) — how would you go about
it?

~~~
gary_bernhardt
If I were building this service, I'd do what several people in this thread
have told you to do, and what I've already told you to do on Twitter: I'd ask
for permission and only record an article after that permission is received.

As I just said to you on Twitter
([https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/874884772174196737](https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/874884772174196737)),
this is blatant and willful copyright infringement. Maybe the owners of the
other works that you're currently infringing on don't care. But if you
continue to do this, you will eventually encounter someone who does care. And
if it goes on for a while, and then they notice, and then they sue you for
lost revenue (which you will probably settle extremely unfavorably because the
infringement is so blatant) then it will be neither enjoyable nor profitable
for you. The American legal system doesn't care whether "no harm [was]
intended" if you are depriving people of the use of their copyrighted works.

Pull all infringing works from the site temporarily (which means every
recording). Email the authors of the infringed works, asking them for
permission. Never post another recording without permission. Maybe it will be
an awesome service.

