What if you could enjoy the great writing on Medium while taking a walk, running errands, or doing dishes? This question has driven us to start testing a new audio feature on the Medium website called text-to-speech.
The text-to-speech experiment is currently only available to a portion of Medium website readers, but our plan is to collect feedback and consider making it available to all readers in the future.
We hope this feature will be the start of many more compelling audio initiatives on Medium.
How it works
At the top of the story page you’ll see a play button. When you press this button, the story text is read to you by a computer-generated voice.
If you don’t like the default voice you can choose from seven other options. Thankfully, the computer-generated voices don’t have feelings and won’t be offended if you prefer one over the other. As far as we know! We may add more voice options in the future.
You’ll also have the option to adjust the playback speed from 0.5x to 4.5x.
We’re experimenting with this because we want all the great writing on Medium to be available to you even when you’re not able to look at a screen. We’re also trying to make Medium more accessible to those who prefer listening over reading.
As a parent of three kids under five, I often find myself short on reading time, and am excited about listening to Medium stories on the go.
What do you think? Hate it? Love it? Please let us know in the responses below.
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