Earthy Player

Intelligently convert HTML to audio.

Motivation

I've never been a fast reader. When I'm given a choice between a physical book, and an audiobook of the same content, I'll reach for the latter... 100 times out of 100. Whenever there's a long piece of text I need to read, I always look for an audio option first. While these options are expanding in recent years, the vast majority of online prose does not allow for listening.

You can use your device's in-built accessibility tools to do text-to-speech. You can ask Siri "read this article" and it sometimes works. But even when it does, this is far from ideal.

I've tried various text-to-speech APIs, and Google Cloud's is the best I've found. They use some sort of machine-learning magic, and as a result, the output sounds extremely lifelike. This is far more similar to a real human voice than AWS' equivalent offering ("Polly"), for example.

So I find myself writing various packages to convert HTML to an audio file I can listen to. Therefore, I wanted to make an npm package from which all of my other projects can import. This is that project.

What It Does

It can do the following things:

1. Take an HTML file and pull out the actual content of the article.
2. Break this text apart into "segments". This means putting pauses in the places where pauses should go, adding sound effects as desired, and cleaning up various abbreviations.
3. Take this "segments" file from the previous step and create an mp3 file.

Also:

1. The Google API will not work if you give it too much text at a time. This repo abstracts away that problem for you, chunking it into separate requests.
2. There are other potential headaches this repo may alleviate, and I will add them to this list later.

Quick Start

You'll need to create a Google Cloud API key. You can use this article as instructions, but the important part is that you end up with a file at ~/.google-api-credentials.json. You'll need to create a project within their console, and then enable the "Cloud Text-to-Speech API" on that project.

You'll also need ffmpeg installed. Install this with brew install ffmpeg or similar.

Let's say you want to convert this article to speech. First clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/Arro/earthy-player.git

Next, go to the example directory:

cd earthy-player/example

Next, install the example:

npm install

Now, run it:

npm start

Finally, check your ~/Downloads folder. There should be a new folder there called readme-cat/.

Run the Tests

These are the commands:

1. npm run test to run the tests. This repo uses ava for testing.
2. npm run tdd to run the test with "--watch" enabled.