Six days since Liso launched here, and thank you genuinely. A lot of what
follows came straight out of things people said in the comments and by email.
Listens are now up to ~45 minutes
The old per-listen cap cut long reads short. You can now paste a full article,
Liso
@evgeny_timofeev I like the hot take, but I also think some content is meant to be read slowly. Have you found certain types of articles work much better in audio than others?
Liso
@reda_roqai_chaoui From my experience, it's X articles on the platform, as that was the main thing that I built Liso for in the first place; however, there are also speed 0.25 or 2x options on Liso.
Liso
@thys_beesman there is nothing code-heavy here, aha. Even with image or video blocks Liso just takes the text parts so i guess it just skips it but you can also try it out and see what would happen in your case ))
Audio removes the lag of sitting down to read, which is usually what kills the backlog. That makes this interesting.
How do you handle content that relies heavily on visuals or formatting to communicate meaning, tables, charts, heavily structured docs. That is where most text-to-audio tools lose fidelity. Is Liso doing anything different there?
Liso
@rohanmanthani To be fully transparent, no, right now Liso just skips the images, video, and graphics. That is something I'm planning on changing with the next update :))
Turning highlighted text into audio on the fly is such a natural extension of how people already read online. Does it work across any website, or are there certain page structures/paywalls that trip it up?
Liso
@ark_y_k Yupp, anything on the web and best on Chrome.
@evgeny_timofeev Good to know — "works on anything, best on Chrome" is a reasonable scope for v1. Are there specific page types (like heavy single-page apps or paywalled content) that tend to be trickier than standard articles?
Liso
@ark_y_k not really no havent seen that issue yet
Liso
@ark_y_k I wouldn't say so, I would say it's worth a test.
the read-later graveyard bit hit close to home, mine is mostly long threads I bookmark and never open. question that hasn't come up - what happens with non-English content? if I highlight a French or Japanese article, does it detect the language and switch voice/pronunciation automatically, or does everything get read in one fixed voice/language regardless of the source text
Liso
@galdayan Hmm, very interesting. I would definetly test this out and see what happens. From what I know its in whatever language the text is in.
@evgeny_timofeev fair enough, honest answer. figured it was worth asking since it's the kind of thing that only shows up once real users throw non-English text at it
Liso
@galdayan agreed
the highlight-to-audio idea is clean but I'd worry about the TTS quality on the actual highlighted snippets - people usually highlight the dense, jargon-heavy sentence, not the easy one. does the voice engine handle stuff like code terms, acronyms, or a string of numbers/stats gracefully, or does it start mispronouncing things once the text gets technical?
Liso
@omri_ben_shoham1 well im not sure how you want code to be read out lol but as far as numbers go there has been no problems, matter of fact you can try it out and let me know)
Turning highlighted text into audio is a nice fit for newsletters and long reads. How does Liso handle inline code, tables, or footnotes in an article? Those usually either get read out literally or dropped, which breaks the flow fast.
Liso
@christian_knaut gets read out the way you highlight them exactly :)