[listenandlearn]

I absolutely love Audio Books, I think I went through maybe 25+ audio books, mostly non fiction, in 2018 alone. It is a fantastic way to maximize dead time, but generally I think non music audio is going through a sort of renaissance.

While the author of this post is really distraught about Amazons dominance with Audible I do think in some ways non music audio is much bigger than just Audibooks for example Podcasts are on the rise and at least for the moment they are totally open. I also think Amazons hold with audio books will be difficult to maintain especially as technology and AI gets better. Why pay them when a great sounding AI could read your book to you.

As a little shameless self promotion I have been working on a side project that does exactly this, it takes any Article or PDF from the web and converts it to great sounding audio so you can listen to it on the go. It sounds pretty good, and it’s a great way to maximize your dead time and stay informed on the go.

If you want to check out my project you can find it here:

https://articulu.com/

[nsomaru]

I’ve been using your app for 2 months on the free plan after seeing you link it here.

The site dailymaverick.co.za which I frequent has built in AI-read voice for articles provided by a third party service. For some reason, Articulu fails to convert some of the articles, which curiously also do not have a converted audio for their third party service. The failure state is not very graceful.

There’s a couple issues with organising my recordings (there’s just a queue at the moment), the seek bar, continuing where you left off and renaming recordings.

Also why do I use up credits in the free plan when I listen to the same article more than once?

[listenandlearn]

Thank you for using the app, sorry that your having those issues. I will look into all of those.

Any chance you can shot an email to [e-mail], so we can see the account, and let us know if your on iOS or Android. Any of the Failed URLs will also be really helpful so we can make the scraping more resilient. We are working hard to add features that help organize articles better.

[chrstphrhrt]

Sweet project! There's also https://curio.io which I stumbled across reading Aeon, and it's got high quality but pretty low volume of content so far (I'm sure they're working on that).

[listenandlearn]

Sure I follow them but their issue is it’s human read articles which is why the volume is so low.

Articles unlike books are being produced in the millions everyday and so it’s really hard to find the best pieces to read over.. which is what they have to do.

I think there is room for letting people listen to anything and AI/ML advancements allow us to get pretty damn close.

[tylergetsay]

I can't hear any samples without downloading the app, I would recommend adding a few.