Subscribe
Sign in
p/ratherlistenConvert URLs, PDFs, & photos to clear spoken audio
Start new thread
Nick Swider

RatherListen - Convert URLs, PDFs, & photos to clear spoken audio

by•

Fit more reading into your schedule by uploading or pasting any news article, chapter, or work document into RatherListen and instantly get a listenable version to absorb while exercising, commuting, or doing chores.

Add a comment

Replies

Best
Nick Swider
Maker
Hey Product Hunt! I built RatherListen as a way to fit more news articles and blog posts into my current routine, especially during morning walks. When listening instead of visual reading, I like to listen at a faster speed to get through more content, and I personally find that I retain more of what I read. Obviously the concept of Text To Speech conversion isn't new, but existing products use outdated conversion technology that sounds more robotic and monotone, making it difficult to listen to for long periods of time and retain the content. Other solutions are also more focused on the education market, as opposed to the consumer and professional use cases RatherListen primarily intends to help. To hear the difference, type anything into the homepage to listen to a custom preview -- no account required! Let me know what you think!
Craig Silva
Love it! Tried it for myself and was blown away by the audio quality compared To other things I’ve tried. Sounds as close to a real person reading it as possible. Impressive work Nick!
Derrick Branford
This is so much better than speechify. The voice is incredibly realistic. I tested it on Arabic names, which most speech apps are notoriously bad at, and it nailed it. Nice work!
Nick Swider
Maker
Great to hear! Glad you like it @derrickbranford!
Jon Gaudette
This is awesome! I've tried other text-to-speech products before but they always fell short. The Chrome extension makes it wicked easy!
Mohammed M. Ennabah
This! I tried searching for product like this before, never found one and I personally started working on the same for a while before I moved to another city and got busy. I'll suggest few things here that I wanted to add to the project: 1- I wish I can select a voice of a public figure, say Morgan Freeman or Johny Ive to read me an article - check this:
2- Choose a news source, say HackerNews, and let the RatherListen tells me what's up everyday. 3- Be a platform and provide APIs for clients.
Nick Swider
Maker
Thanks for the feedback @mennabah1! I'll definitely keep all these in mind, but I'm most excited about #2 and the opportunity to make it easier for people to absorb the content they want to read.
Nick Swider
Maker
@mennabah1 True! If you or anyone else would be interested in a public API, let me know, I could spin one up pretty quickly!
Karen Metson Wallace
I tried it and it is amazing!
Nick Swider
Maker
Glad you like it @karenmetsonwall!
Arush Sharma
How is this different from say Pocket App in which you have listenable version of articles/docs for free!
Nick Swider
Maker
@sharma_arush I like a lot of what Pocket does! I would describe their main focus as helping you organize articles you want to read from the web. Secondarily, they are a discovery platform to find more articles to read. They offer a bunch of other bonus features, including converting articles to audio. RatherListen is for converting anything you have to read into audio -- definitely web articles, but also PDFs, ePUBs, or photos. On our mobile app, you can take a photo of text on a physical object and instantly hear it read to you. Additionally, our voice quality is significantly smoother and more natural than Pocket or other competitors in this space, allowing you to listen for longer. You can hear the difference here: https://www.ratherlisten.app/com...
Arush Sharma
@nickswider Thanks for replying.. Are you using third party apps like Amazon Polly for text - speech conversion or do you have some in house proprietary creation.
Fendisha Apps
I created a similar product a while back https://hewizo.com, there are some challenging problems to be solved in this market but I expect the voice quality to improve within the coming years, wish you best of luck