Ask HN: Is there a way to convert web articles into human read speech?

[nyc_cyn]

Is this something that would be useful to people?

[caseysoftware]

When I worked for Twilio a few years back, I used the text to speech engine to make an RSS reader that would literally read me articles. I don't have the code anymore but the first version only took a few hours.

I demo'd it once in DC and got some interest from blind/web accessibility groups but not sure if they did anything with it.

[nyc_cyn]

Interesting -- how was the quality? In my experience, the machine readers aren't 100% comprehensible; you always have to stop and look at the actual text and it becomes hard to get much use out of it if you're truly on the go. This is never the case with human read audiobooks, which is why they are so useful.

[caseysoftware]

Conveniently, I wrote on that exact issue too: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2013/08/the-pronunciation-challe... (It appears some of the Soundcloud links are broken, but check out my account there for the full samples.)

[nyc_cyn]

Very cool.