Do you have a reading list of articles that grows faster than you can keep up with?
Are you a fan of podcasts because they allow you do explore topics and learn fascinating things while on the go?
Is reading from a screen the last thing you want to do after a long day on your laptop, smartphone and other devices?
ReadCast.ly allows you to drop in URLs or select articles from 60+ global sources - including news, entertainment, business, sports the arts and more - and listen to the content in your choice of 16 female and male voices, read to you with the natural-language text-to-speech technology Amazon has spent years developing.
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Easily toggle between views of your ReadCasts and Top Stories, listening to what you want and saving the rest in your library for later.
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Want to share your favorite ReadCasts with a friend? ReadCast.ly can also give you a link to stream the ReadCast. Or better yet, register for the app and add the ability to send an mp3 file via email or text.
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Have lots of ReadCasts in your queue? Use the search box to filter your results and find all the articles on Bitcoin or Bowie.
ReadCast.ly was conceived, architected and built in 4 weeks as the thesis product of four full-stack software engineers at Hack Reactor in New York City: Michiya Hibino, Viswada Yangala, John Packel and Andrew Fechner.
ReadCast.ly employs 4 APIs to pull data from 60+ news sources, parse the text, convert to mp3 audio and then store and stream from Amazon S3 to the in-app player.
The team also wrote custom algorithms to further cleanse the text and ensure a quality listening experience, and they built a flexible SQL database that enables powerful relational look-ups between users and their preferences, articles and news sources and audio file distribution methods.
