Would you listen to an audio version of your favourite subreddit?
Hey everyone,
Over the last few weeks, I have struggled to keep up with my favourite subreddit, r/SaaS. I had very little free time to go through the posts regularly.
With two kids at home, I spend a lot of time doing chores. So I thought, why not listen to the posts instead?
I wrote a script that converts reddit posts to an audio version.
Here is an example from r/SaaS:
Original post -https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/s593yf/payasyougo_vs_competitors_tiered_pricing_model/
Audio version - https://soundcloud.com/nir-shub/pay-as-you-go-vs-competitors-tiered-pricing-model
I wondered whether this could be helpful for others too.
Would any of you be interested to listen to your favourite subreddit?
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So… I probably wouldn't listen to audio posts for reddit, since I don't spend much time on reddit.
But I do think the idea is pretty cool in general, and it's particularly interesting to me because a) I'm a voracious consumer of text-to-speech content yet b) I've noticed that many, if not most, people seem to absolutely hate text-to-speech content.
I spend a bit of time really wondering why this is, but one thing I'm certain about is that if you can tolerate text-to-speech, you have a massive unfair advantage.
Thanks for sharing!
I was positively surprised how the quality of text to speech improved compared to when I last checked a few years ago. For the above example, I used Google Wavenet, which is getting pretty close to sounding human.
I think there is huge potential in "preprocessing" the text to make it more tolerable for an audio version. For my little experiment, I removed the URLs and added some silence breaks between sentences, but I think there is much more that can be done.
Have you found any good use of text to speech so far? What kind of text content would you consume in audio?
Yep, for a product I'm working on! Unfortunately I won't share anything about it until I launch it.
I can fast-forward through the hypothetical and just mention the text content I already consume in audio:
I follow a system where I try to never allow myself to read content when I first come across it. Instead, I usually add it to my Notion workspace and use text-to-speech technologies to read it later while on the go (during walks, while cooking, while on other relaxing breaks, etc.)
Super exciting!
Thanks for sharing your listening habits, that makes a lot of sense.
owowowoowwowowooougosowow. exciting
yes
Cool! I am curious, when would you listen to it? Would you also use it to catch up with the latest posts?
I'd consider listening to a summarized version of a Reddit thread read by a real human.
That also sounds pretty cool :) What kind of info would be interesting for you to have in a summary of a post?
Not for the Reddit part, but a certain amount of articles I send to Pocket or bookmark, yes absolutely.
I listen to audiobooks a lot when walking or traveling, this would fit in great for longform articles.
Interesting! Are you using Pocket? Did you try out their "Listen to articles" feature?
😱 what!
🤣 totally missed that! Now I did, that's a game changer, thanks for mentioning.