The Request 🙏

Back in December, we received an email from a reader named Patricia who asked if we could produce audio versions of our blog posts. She even directed us to a couple of free text-to-speech services that we might be able to employ for this purpose. Jill and I thought this was a great idea! We had previously toyed with the idea of recording Jill reading our posts aloud but later dismissed the notion because of the time and effort involved. If there was a very cheap (read: free) service that could automatically convert our posts to podcasts with minimal effort on our parts, we were all ears.

I looked at the two services that Patricia mentioned, but neither one was quite right for us. Still, I was intrigued by the idea, so I kept looking for something I liked better. It didn’t take long before I came across an app called Natural Readers, an AI-based text-to-speech service that offers natural-sounding human voices. Even though I’m instinctively suspicious of AI-based anything, in this particular case it seemed worth checking out. The last thing I wanted is for our blog posts to be intoned with a monotonous, robotic voice like that annoying android from the 80s TV show Small Wonder. (Remember that? It was tough to watch back then and is even worse now.) Anyway, if AI could produce semi-natural-sounding text-to-speech, I was all in. I fed Natural Readers our most recent blog post to see how it did and was impressed. The result was mildly stale, maybe a bit mechanical, but overall it was much more natural sounding than I expected.

Unfortunately—but unsurprisingly—Natural Readers is only free for personal, non-commercial, and non-public use. That means we can’t use the service to generate audio versions of our blog posts and embed them directly on travelingworkerbees.com. Even though that would be super cool, we’re quite not ready to shell out the dough for a commercial license. Not yet, anyway. Maybe in the future. However! You, dear reader, can still take full advantage of this service, for the grand price of absolutely nothing. All you have to do is install their Chrome extension, mobile app, or both, depending on how you’d like to listen to our blog posts or any other written material you can find online.

Getting Started With Natural Readers

If you’d like to listen to our posts using a computer or a laptop, you should install the free the Chrome extension. Once that’s done, browse to an article you’d like to have read out loud. Then, click the Natural Readers Chrome extension icon and select which of the characters you’d like as your personal reader. That’s it. Within a few seconds, it’ll start reading the text on the web page that’s currently open.

Since the vast majority of our traffic comes from phones, most people will probably want to use Natural Reader’s mobile app. If you’re reading this on your phone right now, you can click here to find it in the Google Play Store or here to find it in the Apple App Store. Once it’s installed, open it up and follow any setup prompts it presents. Finally, navigate to your favorite blog and pick an article. I even made this little video to show you how it works. (I know. I’m amazing.)

Return To Sender ✉️

I had originally written a truncated version of this post as a reply to Patrica’s email, but the email address she entered in our contact form must have had a typo because my reply bounced back a few minutes later with an error message: “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender”. At that point I decided to just write a dedicated blog post on the subject, figuring that she might not be the only one interested in this. And Patricia, if you’re reading this, now you know why we didn’t respond. 🙂