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Show HN: Robots Reading the News – The Podcast
3 points by ajwinn 3611 days ago
tldr; Podcast of well-spoken robots reading recent news, here's how to listen in iTunes: http://i.imgur.com/67VFszI.png

Here's the podcast link you see in that pic: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8948326/podcast/index.rss

FADE FROM BLACK - COMMERCIAL GUY SPEAKS

Is this you?

(Imagine a frumpy looking fellow sitting at a computer screen, trying desperately to type in CNN.com or FoxNews.com or NPR.org or RealUltimatePower.net into his browser, but accidentally spilling a can of paint all over himself instead. [cue sad sounding trumpet] )

Reading the news is hard! Wouldn't it be better if robots read the news to you?

Now they can!

Introducing "Robots Reading The News"! The podcast that has my mom saying:

"Boy, my son is lazy!"

And my dad saying:

"Who would ever want to listen to a robot read the news?"

With reviews like that, you've gotta try it. Just follow the instructions at the top of the post.

ORDER NOW - ROBOTS ARE STANDING BY!!!!

I built it using Node with: request, cheerio, unfluff (parsing out articles) and say libraries. Python's sumy for NLP summarization plus some text thesaurus spinning, and Ruby's dropcaster for RSS creation in Dropbox.

request https://www.npmjs.com/package/request

cheerio https://www.npmjs.com/package/cheerio

unfluff https://www.npmjs.com/package/unfluff

say https://www.npmjs.com/package/say

sumy https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sumy

dropcaster https://github.com/nerab/dropcaster

1 comments

I'm still messing with it, so that link probably won't work anymore. :) But this one will (until I get the bug and mess with it even more, haha): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8948326/podcast/2016-08-...