This article discusses how to turn a web article into a podcast using Machine Learning for free. This is possible with Podcastle, a free service that converts articles into sound using natural human speech. You don’t need to switch between tabs, everything is done instantly on the current web page.
This service is available as a browser extension which you can access on any web page instantly and convert articles into podcasts. The whole process takes only a few seconds and gives you a podcast of the entire article. Instead of reading articles, you can listen to podcasts.
You can change speaker sound and adjust playback speed. With Podcastle, it allows you to multitask while reading news, updates, articles, etc. Or you can also read side by side quickly.
To change immediately article text Becomes audio podcasts, install the Podcastle extension to your web browser. Currently, it is only available for Chrome and you can grab it from the Chrome Web Store for free or
from here. This extension can also work with other Chromium-based browsers with support for the Chrome Web Store.
For this extension to work, After installing the extension, you have to register it first by clicking on the sign up button. Just click on the extension icon from the menu and proceed with registering. Create an account using your email address and login.
Once you log in to the extension, you can access it on any web page to convert text to audio. Just tab the extension icon on the web page. This opens an on-screen popup with the title of the web page and a button to convert to podcasts. When you click that button, podcastle instantly converts the article into a podcast without leaving the webpage.
After that, the extension popup turns into a media control for podcasts. You can play/pause, search backward/forward, and change volume. On the bottom side of the popup, there are two options. The option on the right is to change the speaker voice, you can choose male or female. And the option on the left is to change the playback speed which you can set to 0.75x, Normal, 1.5x and 2x.
The podcasts that you create with this extension are not saved anywhere. No dashboard whatsoever. Whenever you convert a web article into a podcast, it instantly performs the conversion on the web page. As soon as you leave the webpage, the podcast also disappears.
Also read: How To Convert Articles To Audio Files On Android
Red Thread | Podcastle offers a simple way to get updates, news and read your articles on the web. There are many similar tools but this one is straightforward which makes it perfect for this purpose.
The tool’s landing page states that the tool uses Machine Learning to produce a human-like voice which personally seems overly exaggerated. The sound is better than some third-party voice to speech tools but not very human-like. This is similar to what you get with Google and Amazon’s text to speech tools.
