Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them.
So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts. Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I'll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1]
We are starting out by narrating top articles from HN and some longer cryptocurrency white-papers. Giving away 3 top articles from last week and we’ll be sending one more audio article weekly.
In future and at scale, we’d love to narrate any article or a document, on demand and with only a few hours turnaround time.
Would love your feedback! What type of content would you like us to narrate? Is it easy to access the podcast feed?
Thanks!
So what's the difference?
(Specifically, this site is depriving me of income.)
My initial idea was a browser extension, akin to Pocket, where you click on any article, and then get a narrated version into an app or your personal podcast feed within a few hours. I was afraid it would be very expensive to execute if ton of people would request a vast range of articles, and recording would get little reuse. So I limited articles selection to HN only and decided to launch like this and test the demand.
I agree with the other commenters here, and starting to see how distribution makes all the difference. Again, my intention was not to distribute or to re-distribute the content. But just to help consume it, when there is no time to read.
I'm considering taking the following steps: - turning all possible ways accessing narrated versions from the site — so we are not distributing it. - linking up to Pocket API or building a separate Chrome extension, where users can submit what articles they'd like to listen to. And then providing them this on a personal basis. It'll be a "human screenreader".
What do you guys think? Would you like to use this kind of "human screenreader"? Would content creators object? What are the copyright implications?
Distribution.
Screen readers apply their transform to source content. By becoming that source (regardless of transform) you are distributing it with control of all the benefits involved, such as community, traffic, and ultimately revenue.
Imagine Google AMP or Facebook articles with no way to opt-out (and maybe subscription fee).
The person doing the reading has kind of a funny way of reading it no? Bit of an accent, odd emphasis, lack of emotion, robotic style.
My opinion is that I won't use it with this narrator, but with a better, more practiced english orator I would.
Btw, try listning to this voice on 1.2, 1.5, 2x speed. That's how i typically listen to my podcasts. Sounds perfect to me.
Also, what do you think about our female voice? https://readbyhumans.com/convert-case-studies-into-podcasts There is a demo there. Would you prefer that voice, over our male voice?
- Options vs. cash. By Dan Luu link — [1][2]
- College ROI. By Erik Rood link - [3][4]
- Network protocols. For programmers who know at least one programming language. by Gary Bernhardt - [5][6]
And the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto. https://readbyhumans.com/doc/bitcoin-a-peer-to-peer-electron...
[1] https://danluu.com/startup-options/
[2] https://readbyhumans.com/doc/options-vs-cash-40ncs6z7q
[3] http://erikrood.com/Posts/college_roi_.html
[4] https://readbyhumans.com/doc/college-roi-9jyu8a764
[5] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/compendium/network-protoc...
[6] https://readbyhumans.com/doc/network-protocols-for-programme...
Links to that work convert into paying customers, which is how I buy food and pay my mortgage. You're not only infringing on my copyrighted work, but also depriving my small business of revenue. Remove the infringing copy of my work from your site immediately.
I did try out to sell this as a service to publications a few weeks back, but it seemed like a sales cycle would be way too long and that was not exactly solving my own problem, so I was not as motivated to continues talking to publications. Maybe I'll get back to that later.
I talked to 3 lawyers so far. There are ways to making it work. One way it to set up revenue share with all parties, which is ton of effort, ofc. Another one it to sell the service as a personal narration service, and not as a audio content itself. It seems to be a thin line, and I'm still diving into the details of that. One way or another there seems to be a way to make everyone happy and avoid legal issues. In my opinion, it's mainly a matter of demand. If the demand is high enough for such service, and opportunity is big, then it'll justify efforts, no matter how hard, to make this work.
I'm personally un-sympathetic to Gary's plight to keep his work super secret. This feeling started when I found out that he asks conference organizers to NOT share the recordings of talks he gives. I'm not sure how often this has happened, but it feels against the spirit of presenting against these events.
If I've gotten something wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me, but those are the facts as I see them today.
Second, many many people have tried to build screencasting businesses. One of them turned into an 800 lb gorilla. Most of the rest don't exist any more. AFAIK, DAS was the second subscription-based screencasting company to exist, with the only prior art being a short-lived subscription option offered by TekPub (which was later acquired by the 800 lb gorilla). DAS still exists today, is still independent, and is still (almost) my only source of income, while dozens or maybe hundreds of others have come and gone. I'm sorry if you don't like the way I exercise control over my wholly-owned works, but my business model combined with control over my content has allowed me to do this successfully for six years (modulo a very long break in the middle). And I've never charged money for anything recorded at a conference; that wouldn't feel right.
Check out my reply to andrewstuart2's post above. Seems like there is a way to make this work. Really excited and appreciative of all the comments here.
Yeah, would be great to turn this into "next million jobs", where anyone can go and narrate content.
I'm still figuring out what community to target. Where people would love to listen to that kind of content. What do you think?
Would it help if I contribute a few articles a week? My twitter handle is the same as my username, or see my profile for email.
Thanks for sharing spokenlayer.com again. Good to know people are familiar with them!
How would you scale this up when there are more demands if the product needs real human to read every article? Maybe that can be your business model (commercial reading for private podcasts) - there will be copyright issue though
One feature I think useful for me is that it should be searchable (by voice command is best) and read it from there instead of listening the whole article.
Search — that's an interesting idea. That will probably come in a bit later, when there is tons of demand and we'll be able to pour efforts in all the latest AI q'n'a tech :D
Several people asked this question so far. It's fascinating that people doubt and not sure whether it's AI or person :D
