Increasing my Input by Utilizing Amazon Polly Text to Speech
And building a web app to make it possible
Every morning, Medium kindly sends me an email with dozens of stories for me to read. Realistically I am able to consume 2–4 of these at most per day, and most likely stumble onto a few others throughout the day and before I go to bed at night.
The challenge is that I don’t have enough time in my day to read everything I would like. I have tried a number of apps like Instapaper who offer text to speech but always felt like it lacked the functionality I was looking for. So I built something better.
Storribook is a website, similar to Medium, where you can create recorded versions of articles you want to read and have access to articles others have already recorded. When one article ends the next one immediately starts.
This enables me to plow through a dozen articles on my commute to and from work.
← The articles themselves are even Embed.ly enables and can be posted directly into Medium as well as any Wordpress blog.
You can also organize the articles you like by creating “Books”.
One reason I started this is because of my interest in the growing chatbot trend and my desire to read up on the subject. By creating the “Chatbot” book, all these articles are stored in one place, allowing me to plow through them more efficiently than I could read on my own.
Here is the link to the Chatbot book if interested: https://storribook.com/articles/book/2
You can also track the performance of each recorded article via the “Stats” link, fulfilling the desire we all have of seeing our content gain traction.
Amazon Polly is not perfect, it still sounds like a computer reading an article, but it allows me to consume more information than I was before.
I also think it is just the beginning of a wider trend of consuming content how we want, when we want.
Next time you write an article on Medium, create a recorded version and reach an even broader audience, who may have wanted to read your post but simply ran out of time.
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