Very Normal Podcast

I'm pleased to share a new Very Normal Podcast. No, I am not the host. Instead, I'm the curator and the podcast is a little unconventional.

Add the following feed to your podcast player:

https://storage.googleapis.com/verynormal-tts-podcast/feed.xml

You'll get access to blogs and long-form articles I've converted to audio.

My workflow is to first convert the article into markdown, which ensures that the audio will not have any of the banner ads or menu button text that may be on the article's webpage.

Next, I run a program that I vibe-coded that converts the markdown text into an MP3.

The program uploads the MP3 to Google Cloud Storage and updates a feed.xml RSS feed. The next time your podcast app checks the feed, it will find any outstanding episodes.

The XML feed looks like this:

<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Very normal podcast</title>
    <description>Readings turned to audio by text to speech app.</description>
    <link>https://verynormal.info</link>
...

This podcast is just a minimum viable product I created to help me test the extent to which text to speech technology can turn a blog post into an MP3 I can enjoy.

Preliminary results are that text to speech APIs are quite impressive.

If you are interested in creating your own feed, check out the code on Github. Want this as a ready-to-use service? Let me know and I will consider adding multiuser functionality.