You're probably here because you want to free your hands while consuming your favorite articles, right? 🏃
Maybe you have some experience listening to stories on blog platforms, such as medium.com?
Or perhaps you've tried some text-to-speech (TTS) apps and are looking for a better experience?
Either way, you've come to the right place. In this article, I will introduce you to three types of listeners and how they turn articles into audio. Also, I will show you how to become a pro listener in just a few clicks. 🖱
1. Lazy
These are the people who may click that Play button if a website has built-in TTS, like on medium.com. When clicked, it pops up an audio player widget that reads the article out loud.
Listeners will often notice some annoying things with TTS, such as poor voice quality and the ignoring of images, charts, tables, etc.
Nevertheless, in most cases, they continue listening because it’s convenient.
2. Advanced
Unlike lazy listeners, this group goes the extra mile to find and use TTS apps.
Some use page reader features built into their web browsers. Others use browser extensions, such as this. Some pay extra for premium features in apps like Instapaper to get TTS feature.
But just like the lazy listeners, they also face challenges with TTS, such as lack of context for visuals, reading text word for word when it shouldn't be read like that, and more.
3. Pro
Pro listeners know how to turn web content into audio in a way that preserves important information and gives much better experience. They know about an app that preserve and describe images, tables, and charts, and read the content in a natural voice. And it does all of this in just a few clicks.
I'm talking about article2audio, a web app that converts web articles into audio.
It’s like having a personal assistant that reads articles for you.
I want mention alternatives to article2audio here that work in a similar way, but there are none that can match its features. At least not at the time of writing this article (October 2024).
If you want to try it, sign up and paste a URL to a web article, then hit Enter. Click Convert, and it will take a few moments to fetch and convert the article into audio.
Give it a try!