@jarrod hey — let me know if interested; I took your shortcut to make audio from text (https://heydingus.net/shortcuts/make-spoken-audio-of-text), and changed it to make a call into OpenAI’s TTS service… output is awesome.

@jarrod https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/5be340a306944562a26232ec9a557ae0

just provide your own API key.

@mako Oh, very cool — thank you for sharing! I've been thinking about other improvements and might include this as an option if that's okay? (I'll have to figure out a workaround for the 4096-character limit.)

@jarrod of course!

here's the other thing that I hacked up -
- Find me 3 articles in my feed reader I didnt read yet.
- Get summaries for each via Kagi's Summarizer ( https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html )
- Pass the summaries into ChatGPT, create me a 2 sentence overall summary, and then
- Pass all the results and create me an audio output to listen to later.

End result - a 3 min personal audio clip of articles I may find interesting.

@jarrod maybe call into ChatGPT (summarize to 4000 characters :))

also - @omnivore mobile app has their TTS already in there, streaming audio returned..

@mako Wow, heck of a job! That's very close to my idea of a RSS-catcher-upper. With a few more steps and integrations, you could totally turn those summaries into a self-hosted podcast to listen to in any podcast app. You've got my mind a-turnin'!

@mako Yeah, Omnivore's TTS is best in the business. I send long articles there that I want to listen to. That's a little different than what I'm using the shortcut for, though. My current experiment is to make an audio version of my blog posts to host alongside them on my site. So I'd want them to be exact, not summarized.

@jarrod yup; almost think can just script it up to run at 5am and have a summary ready for you when you wake up.

@jarrod yup! Omnivore just uses OpenAI’s service. Maybe you can bust past the 4096 limit by chunking the output…

@jarrod and wow -- i love the idea of just dropping the audio into a "personalized" podcast feed.

@jarrod @mako I got stuck trying to figure out how to combine the multiple audio files when it's split up.

@jarrod are you trying to do this on iOS? May be easier just to use python to stream to a file.

@mako Yeah, ideally I'd be able to do it from anywhere. Maybe not possible at the moment.

@jarrod That’s my usual experience with shortcuts unfortunately. It gets me 90% there and then I have a battle to the death for the last 10%.

@jarrod I guess you could always try calling it from Pythonista / shortcut..

@mako I hear you. The editing experience has gone severely downhill too. Which is disappointing because it's my favorite "programming" environment.

@mako That's a thought. I've never tried Python or Pythonista, but always up for learning something new!