Katalog
Talk to your reading list
366 followers
Talk to your reading list
366 followers
Save articles for later and listen to them with high-quality AI narration. Use your voice while listening to ask questions, take notes, or highlight important points.
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Promoted
Hey everyone! 👋
Really excited to launch Katalog on Product Hunt today! Thank you so much @fmerian for hunting!
I've been an active Pocket user for a while now, but I have always felt their text-to-speech quality is average at best. The default voice sounds robotic, and the narration skips important pieces from the article. A few months ago, Mozilla officially killed Pocket, which forced me to start looking for alternatives. I specifically wanted to listen to the articles I saved, a complete hands-off reading experience.
Most read-it-later apps out there would simply narrate the text exactly as it's written. But written text usually contains so much implicit context that's not being communicated by plain narration. I'm not even talking about images or videos. Things like headline structure or list items would be impossible to "hear" in most read-it-later apps.
Since I couldn't find anything on the market, I built Katalog – a read-it-later app for audio listeners. Currently, you can:
✻ Save any article from the web by pasting the link or using a Chrome extension. The saved article will be optimized for listening, featuring auto-generated image captions and other enhancements.
✻ Generate an AI audio narration that you can listen to on the web app.
✻ Use your voice to ask questions and take notes while listening. Think of it as an audio-first version of the typical highlights found in most read-it-later apps.
It's free to use while in public beta. You can save an unlimited number of articles, and generate 5 audio narrations per month. I'm happy to increase the limit for you if you reach out with some feedback 🙂
Let me know what you think, would really appreciate your thoughts! 🙏
@fmerian @geek_1001 Congrats on the launch! Katalog’s audio-first take is refreshing, especially with captions and smarter narration. Curious how you see it evolving for power users, like custom voices or richer context handling?
@fmerian @tonyabracadabra My goal is to over-optimize the listening experience as much as possible. Every little detail I think helps – for example, instead of narrating quotes in articles using the same voice, I want to assign a unique voice per speaker, so you can actually feel it's not the original author saying something, but a third-party reference
Beyond improving the listening experience, I'd also love improve context for AI agent. Right now, you can ask a quick question while listening to the narration and talk with AI. It doesn't yet have an extensive context of past conversations, your listening habits, articles you have already read, etc. Adding this context would make it so much more helpful.
neat product, Ahmed. I was an absolute fan of @Upnext, an elegant alternative to @Pocket so I'm psyched to post @Katalog here.
keep up your great work 👏👏
@fmerian Thank you so so much, Flo! Always appreciate your feedback and help with the launch and overall 🙇
FYI @aidanhornsby recently posted an insightful thread on prompting strategies for voice AI agents. Curious if you have any insights on this?
@aidanhornsby @fmerian Ah, interesting! I've been using https://www.openai.fm/ to get some voice prompts inspiration, there are good examples in there
Also, I found a few meta prompt specifically for voice agents https://github.com/openai/openai-realtime-agents/blob/main/src/app/agentConfigs/voiceAgentMetaprompt.txt – this one helped a lot when I was tuning out the tone of voice for the agent
@fmerian @geek_1001 Congrats on the launch! 🙌 We need this after @Pocket is no more.
@fmerian @geek_1001 Super cool! Definitely gotta try it out for my morning gym sessions.
@fmerian @thomaspaulmann Thank you, Thomas! Really appreciate it 🙏
Raycast plugin (+ AI extension) is coming very soon as well :)
@fmerian @geek_1001 Congrats on the launch! Love the audio-first idea. Quick question: can saved articles be listened to offline, like on a commute, or do you always need to stream from the app?
@fmerian @anastasiiazhur Thank you, Anastasiia!
Currently, it's available online only, but the next thing I'm going to work on is the mobile app, and then you should be able to save articles to listen to offline.
I started with web because it was easier and faster to validate the overall idea, but I think mobile is required for a product like that
@fmerian @geek_1001 The idea is great. I would gladly return to listening to the saved links (and I have a lot of them), on the plane. for example. There I finally have some free time, but, most often, there is no access to the Internet. Good luck to you!
@fmerian @anastasiiazhur Yeah, that's a fair point! I'd love offline even for myself when I go for a run. But it made more sense to start with web first
I'm hoping to get the basic app ready at least in a month, and I'll be launching it here as well, most likely. So maybe you could still try out Katalog then if you have a chance :)
RIP Pocket. Loved that app! Do you think Katalog will be able to use on-device AI Capabilities to do the TTS in the future?
@sentry_co thank you so much for your feedback, André!
Yeah, I was looking into Hugging Face models from transformers.js for browsers, but unfortunately, I wouldn't say we're fully there yet. I think in the near future it would be possible to rely more and more on on-device
As the next milestone, I'm also going to work on a mobile app, and I'll definitely take a closer look at what's available in there too
Congrats to the team Katalog with the launch! The tool is certainly very useful..
Tell me, is it planned to add other languag es besides English?
Wishing the team a smooth and successful launch!
Love the idea of listening to articles with AI narration!
Curious—can we customize the voice or speed? 😊
@jason123 Thank you, Jason! 🙏
You can definitely adjust the playback speed (I'm personally always listening on 1.5x or 2x)
The voice is not customizable yet, but I want to implement it slightly differently – basically, use other voices as a way to signify certain things in the article, for example, quotes from other people. Or, just switch the voice up from article to article to make listening experience more engaging
I have been using Katalog for a while now - unlike other AIs which don't make an effort to adjust the readable content, to well-sounding one, it makes things sooo much better! I recommend at least trying it out - it changes my news consumption completely
@sir_shipalot thank you so much, Oskar! 🙏
Great idea! I always save articles for reading later and almost never get back to them. But I definitely prefer audio/podcast format. So your product will be very useful for me because I can actually "read" on the go :)
@anastasiia_kiosieva Thank you so much for your feedback, Anastasiia!
Yeah, I also prefer audio format, it's so much easier to consume information this way. I'm also thinking of adding an automatically generated podcast feed soon. For example, you can save articles in the catalog, it would generate the narration, and then you can listen to it in your podcast player of choice
Big congrats on @Katalog 🚀 Have you considered partnering with publications or newsletters to offer 'Katalog-ready' audio versions of their articles? It could be a brilliant co-marketing opportunity 🤝
@talshyn thank you, Talshyn! Yeah, that's a great idea! I'll definitely explore building an audio component for external publications to embed on their website.
This would also improve the listening quality for everyone because Katalog narration goes well beyond simple text-to-speech (which is what most similar services use)