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Growth · June 13, 2017

TH

Top HN articles in human-read podcast format

Hi HN, Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them. So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts. Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I'll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1] We are starting…

Top HN articles in human-read podcast format launched on June 13, 2017 with 42 votes, #747 of 3,107 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.

Alternativestop 24% of June 2017

In plain words

ReadByHumans converts top Hacker News articles into podcast-format audio narrated by human voice actors rather than automated text-to-speech. It addresses readers who save articles but lack time to read them by delivering content in an audio format suitable for listening while commuting or multitasking. The service initially focuses on popular HN posts and cryptocurrency whitepapers, with plans to expand to on-demand narration of any article or document with fast turnaround times.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN, Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them. So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to…

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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

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