Developing a Service to Convert RSS to Podcast, Inspired by Rebuild.fm
Here is the English translation of the markdown:
Hello. I am @_horotter, a software engineer.
In a previous article, I wrote about wanting to listen to RSS feeds by voice.
I would appreciate if you could take a look at that article, but let me summarize it again. I used to browse the articles that were delivered to my Slack every morning from the RSS feeds I subscribe to, but I thought it would be great if I could listen to them by voice, so I ended up creating a service for that.
A Story Reminded by Listening to Rebuild.fm
Changing the topic, I'm a listener of Rebuild.fm, and I recently remembered that Tatsuhiko Miyagawa had talked about something similar, so I went back and listened to the episodes again to find which one it was.
313: I Know This Person from the Internet (naan)
In this episode, they discussed using the iOS screen reader to read articles aloud, and how the accessibility feature can provide a fairly natural reading experience.
350: Mister O-1 (N, naan)
In this episode, they talked about a self-made script that bookmarks articles that caught their interest based on the titles in their RSS reader, and then hosts the full article text as a podcast on their own server, so they can listen to it during their morning walks. It's a very engineer-like approach.
The common theme is that software engineers, in particular, tend to think a lot about how to improve their productivity. Reading news articles by listening to them as audio or using audiobooks for books are some of the ways they try to optimize their workflow.
Converting RSS to Podcast
In Miyagawa's case, he seems to be using Instapaper to save articles and then selectively turning them into a podcast. My service has a similar concept, so I can't really argue if I'm accused of copying it. But when creating something, the influence of great predecessors is unavoidable, and I'd be glad to express my gratitude if I have the chance.
One key difference is that I'm more interested in a more passive experience. I want to seamlessly transition from scrolling through RSS feeds to listening to the articles by voice, without having to actively select which ones to convert.
So instead of choosing specific articles to turn into audio, I'm aiming for an experience that behaves like an RSS reader, where you can just tap and start listening to the latest articles one after another, without much thinking.
I plan to make the Podcast feed export a paid feature, considering the cost of the Text-to-Speech API. But even without that, the app can function as a voice player by using the built-in text-to-speech capabilities on iOS and Android. So if this article piqued your interest, please feel free to give it a try.
