| I subscribe to about 30 newsletters to stay "on top of things". I read maybe 3. They started to fill up my inbox so I did the responsible thing and created a rule that moved them to a dedicated folder "Newsletters". Now I don't read any. It dawned on me that I'm far more likely to listen to a podcast than read a newsletter. What if I could take all those unread newsletters and turn them into my own personal podcast? So I built Unread. You forward your newsletters to a unique address, and turn them into a conversational podcast episode covering everything you didn't read. You subscribe to the RSS feed in whatever podcast app you already use. It was a fun project to build (you can get more details at https://x.com/benfosterdev). Some of the more interesting technical pieces: - Postmark for incoming emails
- Cloudflare for hosting everything - really enjoyed their durable workflow framework
- Supabase for DB and Auth
- React frontend
- Claude for content extraction, synthesising, research and script writing
- Google Gemini TTS for generating audio (nice support for SSML) I started with ElevenLabs for TTS. It was great and pretty realistic but way too expensive. OpenAI TTS was okay, but barely. Gemini 2.5 TTS hit the quality/price point on the mark (listen for yourself) and has enough control that you can create conversational sounding content instead of two robots talking in a vacuum. There's still a lot of refinement to be done on the script/audio side of things to make it more engaging and human-like but I'm already using it daily to get my tech updates. Next important feature will be to schedule episode creation. You get 5 free episode credits on sign up. Feedback appreciated. |