Launching today
Lisen
Free Read Aloud with Cartesia Voices
104 followers
Free Read Aloud with Cartesia Voices
104 followers
Free read aloud for any article with your Cartesia voices. No subscription on top of your Cartesia plan.
104 followers
104 followers
The word highlighting is probably the feature I’d use most Losing your place while listening is annoying.
The free part is nice I think the real value is having genuinely pleasant voices for longer reading sessions. How does it handle technical articles?
Refocus
Building on top of a Cartesia plan the user already has, instead of stacking another subscription, is the detail I like most here. I work on voice AI for older adults at Callie Care, so the accessibility angle jumps out at me: read aloud is a genuine win for people whose eyesight is going, but most tools bury the controls and cap the slow speed at 0.75x, which is still too fast for a lot of 75 year olds. Have you tested Lisen with anyone in that age range, and how far down does your speech rate go?
Dial
the framing threw me for a second, "free" here means the extension itself, not the voices, since you still need your own Cartesia plan for the actual TTS calls, right? worth being upfront about that split for anyone who reads "free" and expects it to include the audio generation cost too. does it fall back to a browser-native voice if someone doesn't have Cartesia set up, or is that a hard requirement to use it at all