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Matt Waite

Medium Audio Stories - Listen to your favorite Medium stories

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Ryan Hoover
Product Hunt
I've heard rumors Medium was exploring the podcast space and while this isn't podcasting, it's in the audio space. I like this move, and makes it easier to justify paying $5/mo for a Medium Membership (which launched a few months ago) when people are so conditioned to read news/articles for free. Note: 8 months ago some clever guys hacked together a Chrome extension that robot reads every Medium article. This also reminds me of Umano, an app of professionally voice read blog posts and articles. Unfortunately, it couldn't hit the scale it needed and shut down. Perhaps they were too early as voice becomes more accessible through Alexa, Google Home, AirPods, connected cars, etc.
Graham Gnall
@rrhoover is it read by a humon or text-to-speech?
Ryan Hoover
Product Hunt
@ggnall humans. Text-to-speech (as the Play chrome extension supports) is too robotic. Professional readers imbue personality and engage the listener much more.
Nitin Alabur
@rrhoover I miss Umano even now! Hoping MAS sticks around for ever!
Graham Gnall
@rrhoover nice. Totally agree. Couldn't stand as a premium feature otherwise.
Nima Gardideh
Suto
@rrhoover @ggnall TTS is starting to become pretty close to passable: https://google.github.io/tacotron/
Chris Messina
Raycast
How soon before this content is available on Alexa-enabled devices?
Manu Geitner
@chrismessina As far as I know there is no availability to create alexa skills that allow third party voice to be delivered to the consumer. any other knowledge about that? cheers.
Kunal Bhatia
Audio Stories are a great addition for members. 🙌 I wonder what the process is for selecting stories to make audio versions of. 🤔
Nick Horsthuis
Soon you could be hearing you read it back to yourself. Would be cool if you could highlight sections to review in the text or listen to later.
Robert T. Maisano
Holoholo
This is really cool. Does the writer of an article make a voice file too? Or is the voice recording done by someone at Medium?
katie zhu
Maker
@robert_maisano Thanks! We have some narrations that writers record themselves, and then other ones we get professional voice actors and actresses to voice
Robert T. Maisano
Holoholo
@ktzhu that's awesome. Thank you
Kartik Parija
@ktzhu This is absolutely wonderful. Congrats. We need to show you something we are building that you should find very interesting. Have gotten an intro to Monica & EV, and will reach out soon. But would love to get you in the loop right from the beginning. We love Product/Engineering folks, given that's what we are. Do let me know. Cheers.
Angela Bowman
Is there a story I can listen to for free? Before I decide to subscribe, I'd really like to hear an example.
Ferit T.
This really creates some value to the membership. I'm currently a member because I believe that news & advertisement are contra-productive. The latest App Store update also says that "members can now listen audio versions of every member-only post"
Gavin
Re:amaze
This is great! This is what I envisioned long-term for https://www.producthunt.com/post... (RIP) to be, but didn't have the funds to support the idea. I'm super glad to see Medium have built it!
Alexandre Mouriec
I like the idea and especially the fact that you need to be a member to use it (even if I don't currently pay for it 😅) because it will help Medium find a sustainable business model with their membership. I think Pocket could have also done that to help people reduce their Pocket queue. You can already listen to articles saved by using IOS and Android TTS but it's a robot voice, not a professional voice.
Jonathan Pilovsky
Finally, a solid justification for Medium membership! I'm disappointed they didn't include the ability to change playback speed...TTS wins there. Audm supports speed on narrated articles but it's $7/month.
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