Liso
Highlight text on any page and turn it into audio.
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Liso - Highlight text on any page and turn it into audio.

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Highlight any article, newsletter, blog post, or page on the internet. Liso instantly turns it into beautiful audio. Your personal audiobook, built from the things you actually want to read.

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Maker
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Hot take here: you are never going to finish your reading list. Not this year. Not ever. And its not because you are lazy (okay, maybe a little; so am I). It is because reading was never the point. The ideas were. Words are just the delivery method for us, and staring at a screen is the slowest, most fragile method we have So I dropped everything to build Liso; now none of us would have to read ever again Highlight anything on the web, an article, a newsletter, a thread, a doc- right-click, and it turns into natural audio in your library in one step. A personal podcast made entirely of the stuff you actually chose to read. My "read later" graveyard of articles, blogs, and posts is now a listening queue I finish on walks, at the gym, doing the dishes. Best part? Close to 0 screen time. The part that gets me in trouble is: I think "read more" is bad advice. "Absorb the ideas you care about, in the format that fits your life" is the real move, and obviously take action on it. For a lot of us, that format is our ears, not our eyes. A few things people always ask: Works on any site with the Chrome extension, or just paste text into the app Offline downloads, resume across devices, Apple-style folders to keep it organized I would genuinely love your most brutal feedback. And I am curious: what is the one thing rotting in your "read later" or "saved for later" pile right now that you know you will never actually open? Drop it below and I will tell you if Liso would have saved you in this. Never read again.

 I like the hot take, but I also think some content is meant to be read slowly. Have you found certain types of articles work much better in audio than others?

Maker

 From my experience, it's X articles on the platform, as that was the main thing that I built Liso for in the first place; however, there are also speed 0.25 or 2x options on Liso.

Audio removes the lag of sitting down to read, which is usually what kills the backlog. That makes this interesting.

How do you handle content that relies heavily on visuals or formatting to communicate meaning, tables, charts, heavily structured docs. That is where most text-to-audio tools lose fidelity. Is Liso doing anything different there?

Maker

 To be fully transparent, no, right now Liso just skips the images, video, and graphics. That is something I'm planning on changing with the next update :))

Turning highlighted text into audio on the fly is such a natural extension of how people already read online. Does it work across any website, or are there certain page structures/paywalls that trip it up?

Maker

 Yupp, anything on the web and best on Chrome.

 Good to know — "works on anything, best on Chrome" is a reasonable scope for v1. Are there specific page types (like heavy single-page apps or paywalled content) that tend to be trickier than standard articles?

Maker

 not really no havent seen that issue yet

Maker

 I wouldn't say so, I would say it's worth a test.

Congrats on the launch , happy that we are launching in the same day as you!

Question: have you thought if Liso can be used for accessibility?

Maker

 appreciate it brother, well you've just sparked a new use case aha no I haven't thought about that before.

💡 Bright idea

 yes! I think that would help those who need accessibility immensly
And the bonus part, think of all the funding opportunities (grants) you can tap into if you explore that option

fair, code was more a curiosity than a real use case honestly. good to hear numbers hold up, might actually give it a try for articles with a lot of stats in them

The thing rotting in my saved for later pile is a long technical deep dive on RAG architecture I bookmarked months ago and have opened maybe twice. It is exactly the kind of dense, code heavy writeup that never survives the jump from eyes to ears well, since it leans on diagrams and inline snippets that don't translate to audio. So my honest answer to your own question is Liso probably would not have saved that one specifically, but it would have saved the surrounding context and explanation, which is most of what I actually needed anyway. On the actual product, my real concern is anything code heavy or with tables and diagrams. A lot of what ends up in a reading pile is technical writing, not narrative prose, and text to speech tends to either skip that content awkwardly or read it in a way that makes it meaningless out loud. How does Liso handle a highlighted article that has inline code blocks or a table in the middle of it, does it narrate around them, skip them, or attempt to read them as if they were plain sentences.
Maker

 there is nothing code-heavy here, aha. Even with image or video blocks Liso just takes the text parts so i guess it just skips it but you can also try it out and see what would happen in your case ))

Congrats on the launch! I like that you're focused on a very specific workflow instead of trying to be another generic text to speech app. Turning articles and newsletters into an audio queue is great for people trying to stay ahead of industry news and research. Curious what surprised you most after people started using it. Was there a use case that emerged that you didn't originally design for?

Maker

 Not yet, to be honest we are still testing and getting data on how users would use this and for what type of content.

For me it was all those X articles that I've saved from last year.

This is such a relatable idea. My saved reading list keeps growing, but I would happily listen to many of those articles while walking or doing chores. Turning selected content into a personal audio queue feels much more intentional than relying on a generic podcast feed.

Maker

 Aha I can't relate more. I have probably about 50+ articles from X bookmarked and never read. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have even read them unless i figured out a way to listen to them.

Congratulations!! Products like this usually come from a personal frustration. Curious, Was there a moment where you thought like, "I wish I could just listen to this instead of reading it," and decided to build Liso?
Maker

 Quite literally my X article backlog that I know I won't ever get to reading. In my personal opinion, text-to-speech is one of those technology advancements that is still underused. Its quite literally something that buys back your time in real time.

That's an interesting way to put it—"buys back your time in real time." I can definitely relate to the X backlog 😅. I'm curious, have you noticed people mostly using Liso to catch up on content they would have otherwise skipped, or is it actually replacing part of their podcast or audiobook time?
Maker

 yeah mainly just catching up and efficiency, for some people it's they just don't want to read the research paper or a doc or an analysis or an SOP.

the read-later graveyard bit hit close to home, mine is mostly long threads I bookmark and never open. question that hasn't come up - what happens with non-English content? if I highlight a French or Japanese article, does it detect the language and switch voice/pronunciation automatically, or does everything get read in one fixed voice/language regardless of the source text

Maker

 Hmm, very interesting. I would definetly test this out and see what happens. From what I know its in whatever language the text is in.

💎 Pixel perfection

 fair enough, honest answer. figured it was worth asking since it's the kind of thing that only shows up once real users throw non-English text at it

Maker

 agreed

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