▲ ▼ Human voice summary of news
There are several news apps which offer automated summary of news, but they don't match the quality of human summarized content like InShorts in India. But they don't offer read aloud feature i.e. voice summary of the news.
I just want to click play and want to listen to the bite-sized news one by one instead of scrolling through them visually. I know that Google Assistant & other voice based assistants do offer news but they are usually auto-summarized web article or snippets from the TV news; both of them are not as good as the human summarized news content.
I would like a service which could convert these text based human summary of news to audio or a human voice summary of news itself.
I would like a service which could convert these text based human summary of news to audio or a human voice summary of news itself.
Most large, reputable news agencies do this through an older technology - radio. NPR and BBC World Service still do top-of-the-hour news summaries, less than 5 minutes in length, and available on-demand on their web sites. This used to be a standard feature of any new radio service in the US. You got a summary of the news at the top and bottom of every hour. NPR (US), BBC World Service, PBS (US), and many newspapers do these still today,. Some post them on their web sites, some publish as podcasts. All use professional journalists with high editorial standards. What is it about those that you find inadequate? The New York Times calls theirs "the Daily". NPR does a four and a half minute summary of news every hour, available in their website.
Are those audio summary human voice summary or automated? They're great sources for news but not available for India. AFAIK InShorts type app is not available in US.
Being partially blind, I have been looking for something like this for a while. I can use accessibility features to read what's on screen but many elements on the screen of most apps are unnecessary and reading it aloud is often irritating. Short audio news would indeed be better.
I had a platform where anyone could summarize web content and share it through voice - https://web.archive.org/web/20210225163329/https://larynx.io/ and bots which auto summarized web content to audio over Twitter, Messenger, Telegram & Slack.
I agree that human voice summary as in InShorts are still better as humans could add more context to the summary which the algorithms are not capable of now, but things are changing fast.
That's so cool! Why did you shut it down, Seems very useful?
Voice was not hip like how it is today when we released larynx (2016), it saw good growth only in China in their own android app stores (someone stole our app and put it there) and in Apple Appstore but we couldn't come up with proper monetization strategy. It got adopted only in China because the users there didn't have inhibition towards voice messaging in public unlike other demographics. This is why I'm waiting to see if the ClubHouse trend lasts after pandemic gets resolved and everyone starts moving out of their house for work.
Btw, I have created an automation for reading aloud inshorts news automatically - https://abishekmuthian.com/voice-summary-of-news/ . But a permanent solution would be for them to implement this feature or a new player for just voice summary of news which can also be immensely useful for customers like @Fraser.
Thanks a lot, I used your tasker profiles to get the read aloud feature. A minor bummer being that the screen should be kept on for it to work, but then again your display tasker profile does make it easier to switch display timeouts based on the usage of inshorts.
I do feel inshorts have all the positive reasons to integrate it as a feature within their app or else a separate audio only short news app would capture this market.
It's a shame that larynx didn't workout, I would like sharing content with voice with my friends.