Medium Audio Stories - Listen to your favorite Medium stories

Awesome. It's like they read my mind

I can give my voice. ;)

Always nice to see people catching up with what we've been doing at TidBITS for years. :-) We record most articles (it doesn't make sense for everything) and make them available directly from the article or as a podcast. Our versions aren't terribly popular with our readers, so I wouldn't bet big money on this effort from Medium continuing in the long run or attracting a vast listenership. (We do it as much as a final editing pass as anything else.) Doing the recording is also quite a bit of work, both on the reading and technical sides. See http://tidbits.com/article/12953 for a writeup of what we do technically.

While this is cool, especially the fact that it's a real human voice and not a horrible text-to-speech synthesiser, I really wish there was a more general "reading things out app", which would work with any URL or data source, not just Medium articles. Also I'd like an app where the voice doesn't just read off the text verbatim, but goes more slowly over complicated phrases and sentences, perhaps drops out here and there to explain and clarify stuff, and just generally covers it in a way that's super accessible and understandable to someone who is on-the-go and mildly distracted. Something I find so annoying is having to stop in the middle of walking a busy street just to try and scrub back a podcast by 15 seconds so I can re-hear a particularly tricky 10 seconds that I didn't quite catch. So I want to flow and speed to be slow enough for me to completely absorb the ideas while out walking/commuting, without having to scrub.

How does this compare with Speechkit (speechkit.io)? I'm looking for ways to embed similar tech in PR release etc