Options for Audio Summary of articles?

[HonestShadow]

I love this site, but life has made it more difficult recently to be able to enjoy reading the articles how I used to, so I'll looking for alternatives to stay updated, mainly audio. Any chance of article audio summaries coming to the site anytime soon? (the little play button at the top of every article that some sites have, either by someone reading it ($$$) or more likely from a computerized voice which honestly would be fine doesnt need to be fancy)

Guessing not, in which case, what are the best options out there to be able to easily convert several articles a day to audio to listen to? I've played around with NotebookLM, and copy pasting full articles into text-to-speech websites, but it's a bit clunky/and or electricity intensive to convert a list of articles to a podcast format. I know there's apps out there you can buy which aren't cheap and you sometimes also need to give them lots of permissions so trying to avoid those from a cost and privacy standpoint if i can. I see the Ars podcast went away 4+ years ago, but I'd still rather just be able to listen to a list of full articles on a walk anyway.

Appreciate any thoughts or suggestions (and yes I know there's a "are you a paying subscriber" factor here too so maybe if it was a feature added to the site it's only for paying members)

 

[meisanerd]

So, I think it is a subscriber-only option (which you are, so shouldn't be a problem, just don't want regular members to think they are possibly missing something), but the articles are all available to download as PDF. So it might be an option to find an app that can just do TTS for PDF files, that might save you a bit of effort, rather than having to copy/paste, download as audio, etc.

The ePub reader I use on Android is Librera, it has TTS built in and can open PDF files.

 

[Aurich]

We are very good about supporting proper markup and HTML for our site to be used by screen readers.

I am not versed in that particular ecosystem, so I can't make any recommendations beyond that though.

 

[Defenestrar]

Using a screen reader in Neutron Star mode seems like an efficient way to get the gist of an article before diving in for full text. My dad isn't an Ars reader, but I expect that's how he would preview articles (he's completely blind).

I haven't played with it recently, but I believe that AI tools are also good at providing audio summaries of text (including html links). I don't know how accessible the AI tools are.

 

[Coriolanus]

I think you can load urls into Notebooklm and use it as a source? Why not take the rss feeds, pull out the article urls from the last 24 hours, and then use notebooklm to turn it into the podcast?

You can either write a short script to pull the URLs, or you can make a ChatGPT Project or Gemini Gem to parse it for you.