
Show HN: Blog Reader – Listen to webpages via a personal podcast - The_Amp_Walrus
https://www.blogreader.com.au/
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The_Amp_Walrus
I've been working on this for the past few weeks and was surprised to see
pretty polished competitor posted yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454863)

Oh well, great minds think alike!

EDIT: Similarly, this uses Google's Text to Speech
([https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-
speech/)). If this gets some traction I would love to develop my own TTS model
using WaveNet ([https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-
audio...](https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/)),
since the TTS API is super expensive.

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billconan
I thought about adding tts to my blog too. I would start from
[https://github.com/mozilla/TTS](https://github.com/mozilla/TTS)

~~~
sid24rane
Thanks for sharing. Went through the sample audios they seem to be much better
than Google TTS.

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The_Amp_Walrus
Are you referring to the "basic" Google TTS or the WaveNet option? I believe
the WaveNet voices are much, much better than those produced my any other TTS
service or publicly available model, but I'd love to see some counter-
examples.

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PranshuGarg
I can use Edge browser for the same. Then why should I pay $12 per hour?

~~~
The_Amp_Walrus
\- The Edge browser feature requires you to select text and then listen to it
while you have the webpage open, my service can be used asynchronously like
any other podcast - when you are commuting, cooking etc.

\- The Edge browser text-to-speech feature sounds stilted and robotic, and I
personally would not want to listen to it for an hour. The TTS converter than
I am using sounds better, but costs money. Check out the demos at the bottom
of the landing page for some examples.

\- My service costs $2 AUD per hour, not $12 per hour.

