Startup Stories:
Audioread
Listen to any article, PDF, email,
etc in your podcast app
Hello there 👋!

Kyle is a former engineer at Cruise and is currently in Harvard Business School. Eric built a profitable, NLP-based SaaS company called Y Translator.

We met in an interesting 74-person coliving place called Tribe in San Francisco and recently relocated to Mexico City! (Anyone in the area? Let’s connect!)

We love reading online since it’s one of the most effective ways to discover new perspectives. However, reading is kinda hard and time-consuming 🤷‍♂️ which lead us to constantly having a huge backlog of things to read.

At some point, we turned Paul Graham’s essays into audio podcasts for fun. We loved listening to them, as did our friends. So we decided to create a tool that allows you to do just that -- listen to any web article.

We use Audiblogs to “read” while we exercise, cook, run errands, etc. We now have 1-2 hours of extra time per day that we can use to read other things!

If you love to read but don’t have enough time, you’ll love Audiblogs!

Try it and let us know what you think!
*Note: Kyle is now building banana.dev 🍌 and Eric is at UnrealSpeech 🤯
💪 Their Motivation

🤔 Why do we read?

Humans have an innate desires to learn. If we didn't, we wouldn't have all developed such complex languages. Instead, we'd still be communicating with the same simplicity as other animals, using basic sounds to express things like "eat," "sleep," "fight," etc.Languages evolved to enable us to express ideas and learn from each other. And about 5,000 years ago, humanity figured out a way to communicate and spread knowledge at scale: BOOKS.This revolutionary invention allowed us to learn from people on the other side of the world, going beyond the limitations of word-of-mouth communication.Over thousands of years, reading became the ultimate source of wisdom. If you're smart, you read. If you read, you're smart. Reading has become the necessary and sufficient condition that makes a person wise in our society.

🤷 Why not to read?

We think that reading isn't the most natural way to learn. We've been taught to think that reading is the best way, but only because it's cheap and has been the status quo for thousands of years.Imagine this: Would you rather read a book for hours or have an opportunity to discuss with the author 1-on-1 for a couple of hours?The author would condense the knowledge and adapt the language in a way that you can understand. You can go back and forth asking questions, clarifications, and more.Discussion is superior to reading when it comes to learning. Unfortunately, this is extremely expensive. Popular authors simply do not have enough time to chat with everyone.

🚀 What's next to read?

We believe we can replicate the experience of learning directly from the authors through verbal discussion, thanks to recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing, and Speech Synthesis.This actually isn't as far-fetched as it may sound. We have a small demo coming up that may give you a glimpse of what might be possible in the future (Hint: GPT-3). So, stay tuned! 👀

🎧Turn your reads into podcasts
👂 Listen in basically any podcast app
…except Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio 😢
Or listen in the browser (no installation)!
🖱️Two Clicks Away
You can also forward emails, upload PDFs, and paste text in Chrome, on Android, and on your iPhone.
🎸 Listen while you do other things
Try for free. Starting at $1.99 per month.
😻 Product Hunt Reception
🔼 2,112 upvotes
💬 269 comments
4.9/5 and 113 reviews
The community submitted over 13,800 nominations to tell us what products were their favorites from 2021. Audioread (formerly Audiblogs) was nominated in the Audio & voice category and became finalist of the Golden Kitty Award 2021.
Got time to read meow?
I'll give it a spin