Launching today
Liso
Highlight text on any page and turn it into audio.
77 followers
Highlight text on any page and turn it into audio.
77 followers
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.
Liso
@evgeny_timofeev 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?
Liso
@reda_roqai_chaoui 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.
Liso
@thys_beesman 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 ))
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?
Liso
@rohanmanthani 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?
Liso
@ark_y_k Yupp, anything on the web and best on Chrome.
@evgeny_timofeev 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?
Liso
@ark_y_k not really no havent seen that issue yet
Fedica
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?
Liso
@jonwesselink 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.
Liso
@cathy_cc 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.
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