I think I've said this before but this totally doesn't understand why podcasts are popular. So much media material is inauthentic that long form podcasts became big as people were looking to connect with other people authentically.

This concept, of creating a podcast using AI is exactly the kind of inauthentic thing podcasts got popular because of and as an alternative to. Crowd sourcing HN material to put through an AI tool for marketing buzz is the opposite of the impetus for podcasts. It fails as a podcast from the get go. You can't connect with this host - they don't offer opinions, they don't offer insight into their history or personality. There's no human on the other end, just a narrator regurgitating stuff a computer scraped from a website.

That the host sounds better than siri or google assistant doesn't redeem the concept which is bankrupt as a podcast from the get go.

Hey, thanks for commenting! Totally get what you mean about wanting that authentic connection. That said, more and more people are turning to podcasts for practical reasons (like getting a rundown of the news) rather than just for conversation (like on the Joe Rogan Experience). And with the advancements in AI tech, synthetic voices can sound pretty close to human ones, especially in news readouts. So what we're trying to do here is to offer a useful option for people who prefer to consume information in audio format. It seems that many people found this valuable already, judging by the stats over the past 12 hours.

Agreed, I don't think the success of conversational podcasts precludes using the same platform for something like this.

Other feedback:

For this HN Recap, 20 mins daily is a bit long, a 5-10 minute version would genuinely be part of my daily routine.

1 chapter/section per story would be cool, so that I can skip stories I'm not interested in. I listen to podcasts through PodcastAddict on my phone but tested this on Spotify web at my computer, maybe this is already in there & I just didn't see it.

Echoing what others said - I'd love for the general vibe of the comments to be included in some way, I actually tend to spend more time in HN comments than reading the articles themselves.

Finally, I'm sure this is on your radar already, but IMO the big opportunity with AI-synthesized podcasts is personalized podcasts. For example, a personal Hacker News Recap RSS feed that knows the kind of stuff I upvote, or has me opt in to topics/tags when signing up.

piggybacking off of this, I categorically do not allow this company to use any of posts for their commercial purposes, period.

I don't think it qualifies as a podcast. It has no host, it contains no discussion, it adds nothing to the articles being summarized, it does no journalism and adds no benefit except, as you said, shifts the summaries to an audio format. So there are some people who don't want to read and would rather just have things read to them.

Is that a podcast? I don't think so. Is it authentic? Probably not but its not claiming to be anything but an ai tool, at least, but the whole thing you're doing is that your voice sounds more human than other ai voices.

Whatever it is, its not a podcast. It's ai generated summaries being read by an ai voice.

For me those are different use-cases. In this one, I just need someone to run me through HN while I drive to work, they don't need to have a personality

Yes thats it. I stopped listening because although the voice is good and has vocal variety and expression it still sounds boring. I would rather listen to a human but “boring” voice than this. Uncanny valley perhaps. It is probably what is being said that is the problem here. Maybe some prompt engineering could spice it up a little.

For me what would move this from an interesting proof of concept to something that might become part of my routine is incorporating user comments on the top posts into the podcast. What is the community's reaction to each post? What debates have they sparked? This is HN's secret sauce.

Hey, we actually built out the functionality to support this. Happy to flick it on for upcoming episodes and get some feedback!

Overview of comments now in each episode!

The voice is insanely good (a few long vowels are noticeably artificial/synthesized if you're paying attention, but that's a tiny nit), what tools do you use to generate it?

Thanks! For text-to-speech we are using models that we have trained on top of the elevenlabs engine.

Firstly, this is a brilliant way to market your company. It's a legitimately useful service that show cases your company's abilities. Win win!

Secondly, the quality is really good. The voice sounds great, although there were some points where the voice got super awkward in a non-human way. Here's an example:

"Recently Meta introduced Llama <super awkward pause and intonation> an innovative LLM that matched GPT's performance, despite ..."

I'm guessing it was trying to read a : or some type of punctuation that made it flow weird, as I've run into this with speech synthesis before as well.

The background music is great!

Hey! Thanks for the nice words!

You're correct about the intonation, and thank you for pointing out that example. Before we run the text through speech synthesis, we try to adjust it to be suited to conversational language. While this helps to address most intonation issues, there are still a few that slip through.

Another challenge we face is using domain-specific language, like C#. It's a bigger issue, but we're actively exploring different solutions to overcome it.

Glad you're finding this to be a useful service, we will be covering a lot more than HN.

I disagree with the first commenter. A lot of people like podcasts to stay up to date with niche topics while being able to consume in an audio format. I listen to up to 4 hours of podcasts a day because I can listen while I do other things. I think this is great.

There are many types of podcasts. Don't get discouraged. Podcasts are like pizza. Everyone likes a different kind and everyone thinks the ones they like are the best.

It may be more interesting as a dual host format, where one person is knowledgeable and the other is asking questions. Otherwise it can get monotonous to simply hear someone read a summary.

This is really good! The voice sounds much like This American Life. Is it inspired by that?

It is a bit boring though. Maybe add some other voices or even discussions?

How many days are you going to run this, because already this type of website arise and stop with in months...

As long as the community is interested, we'll keep running this. We've seen some strong interest until now, with more than 1000 downloads for the first episode and it grows day by day. Subscribe in your platform of choice so we can keep this going!

Is there a way I can define length of the podcast? So say I just want a 5 mins recap vs. a 50 min full episode?

Not something we've built yet, but will add to the roadmap. Do you lean one way vs the other in terms of length at the moment?