This post can read itself to you
Every post on this blog has a Listen button. Here is how it works and why we built it the simple way.
At the top of this page there is a button that says Listen to this post. Press it and your device reads the article aloud. You can pause, resume or stop at any point.
No audio files
There is no recording behind the button. Browsers come with a speech feature built in, and the button simply hands it the text of the article. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is sent anywhere: the reading happens on your device, with a voice your device already has.
Why not record real audio?
Recorded or generated audio sounds more polished. It also has to be made again every time a post is edited, stored somewhere, and paid for. For a blog, the built-in voice is the smallest thing that does the job, so that is where we started.
The details that mattered
- The text is handed over one sentence at a time, because some browsers cut off a long passage partway through.
- If a browser has no speech feature, the button does not appear at all, so nobody presses something that cannot work.
- Leaving the page stops the reading.
The honest trade-off
The voice is not ours to choose. It differs between phones, laptops and browsers, and some sound better than others. If that ever matters more than simplicity, the next step is audio prepared in advance. Until then, the simplest version is doing the work.