vivek-nexus / listen

A world-class multilingual reading companion that helps you listen to any written material (instead of reading on your screen), in a variety of languages

Listen

Your world-class reading companion

A web app that helps you listen to any written material (instead of reading on your screen), in a variety of languages.

• You can use it to listen to news pages or blog pages, as if they were podcasts
• You can use it to proof-read, or should we say, proof-listen to your writing
• You can use it to record voice-overs
• and much more...

View the app at https://www.vivek.nexus/listen.

Older versions of this project: v4 | v3 | v2

Integrating Listen on your blog

Allow your readers to instantly listen to your pages

[Option 1] Load Listen as an iframe (code method)

• On your blog pages, load Listen as an iframe in a suitable way. Make sure the iframe size is at least 360px by 780px for optimal UI experience.
• Make sure to allow cross origin requests (CORS) on your website server from https://www.vivek.nexus origin, so that Listen can fetch article HTML from your server.
  • If you use no-code hosting methods, consult your hosting provider's documentation to enable CORS
  • If you control the code on your server, see https://www.w3.org/wiki/CORS_Enabled for instructions
• Send your article through URL parameters. See below section for details.
• You can also first check if user has at least one voice of a specific langauge, with my simple helper function. The result of this function can be then used to condiitionally determine if Listen should be offered for that user.

[Option 2] Open Listen in a new tab (no-code method)

• On your blog page, add a button or text such as Listen to this article
• Hyperlink the text or the button, to open Listen in a new tab. Send your article through URL parameters. See below section for details.

Send article through URL parameters

Passing article link

Pass the link as a URL parameter

Example: https://www.vivek.nexus/listen/app?url=https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-handle-anxiety-lionel

Passing article text

Pass the article text as a URL parameter. URL encode the text for sanity.

Example: https://www.vivek.nexus/listen/app?text=This%20is%20the%20first%20line%20of%20the%20article.%0A%0AThis%20is%20the%20second%20line.%20Make%20sure%20to%20URL%20encode%20the%20text%20before%20passing

For nerds

1. To detect language of article: Google compact langauge detector v3 via cld3-asm (https://github.com/kwonoj/cld3-asm)
2. To extract article text from HTML: Mozilla Readability (https://github.com/mozilla/readability)

Help

For help with anything on the app or to report a bug, create an issue here https://github.com/vivek-nexus/listen/issues