This article covers a simple method to instantly turn web articles into podcasts using machine learning for free. This is possible with Podcastle, a free service that converts the articles to speech using natural human speech. You don’t have to switch back and forth between tabs, everything happens instantly on the current webpage.
This service is available as a browser extension that you can access on any webpage instantly and convert the article to a podcast. The entire process only takes a few seconds and gives you a podcast of the entire article. Instead of reading the article, you can listen to the podcast. You can change the speaker’s voice and adjust the playback speed. This allows you to multitask while consuming the news, updates, articles, etc. Or you can also read side by side to quickly yet carefully go through stuff.
Also read: Convert Video Conferences to Podcasts for Free: Anchor
Instantly Turn Web Articles into Podcasts
To instantly turn web articles into podcasts, install the Podcastle extension to your web browser. Currently, it is available for Chrome only and you can fetch it from the Chrome Web Store for free. The extension will also work with other Chromium-based browsers with supports for Chrome Web Store. After installing the extension, you have to sign into it to make it work. Simply click the extension icon from the menu and proceed with sign up. Create an account using an email address and the login.
Once you are logged in to the extension, you can access it on any webpage to convert the text to speech. Simply tab the extension icon on the webpage. This opens a popup on the screen with the webpage title and a button to convert to a podcast. When you click on that button, it almost instantly converts the article to the podcast without leaving the webpage.
After that, the extension popup changes to media controls for the podcast. You can play/pause, seek backward/forward, and change the volume. On each side of the seek bar, there are two options. The option on the right is to change the speaker’s voice, you can go with either male or female. And the option on the left is to change the playback speed which you can set to 0.75x, Normal, 1.25x, and 1.5x.
The podcasts you generate with this extension are not saved anywhere. There is no dashboard on anything. Whenever you turn a web article into a podcast, it instantly does the conversion on the webpage. As soon as you leave the webpage, the podcast is lost too.
Closing Words
Podcastle offers a simple way to get your updates, news, and read articles on the web. There are many similar tools but this one is direct which makes it perfect for this use. The landing page of this tool says that it uses machine learning to generate a human-like voice which seems like an over-exaggeration personally. The voice is better than some third party voice to speech tool but it’s not very human-like. It is similar to what you get with Google and Amazon’s text to speech tools.
