How I Read Way Too Much Stuff
As I'm tiptoeing into the crocheted goods business (My crochet website is www.jpwcrochets.com and my Etsy store is www.jpwcrochets.etsy.com), I spend a lot of time crocheting. This leaves my hands occupied but my mind free to roam. I don't really watch TV, so I listen to audiobooks and podcasts to try to make good use of all that otherwise idle time. But I found that I would get behind on my RSS feeds and even my email. I now use two tools to help me better manage all the words that come into my life in digital form.
Readwise Reader recently replaced Feedly as my RSS reader of choice. In all honesty, I think the many Feedly-compatible applications available are generally better at being pure RSS readers than Readwise, but Readwise's excellent web extension and Text-to-Speech (TTS) capabilities are what sold me on the paid subscription. It offers other features such as AI summaries (it feels like everyone is required to offer this nowadays) and email addresses so you can send email newsletters to your Readwise library. There are apps for Android, iOS, and Windows and it's also usable as a web app. It's very useful for reading many kinds of internet content.
But it's not really designed to read content in your browser. Readwise is concentrated on you bringing everything to it. This is where Speechify fills in the blanks for me. I do have some email newsletters going to Readwise and I do send some internet articles there as well. But if want my email read to me, or I just want to listen to an article in my browser, Speechify is great for this. After you install the extension (sadly, it's not currently available for Firefox), you have a play button for the web. Any article where Speechify detects text, it will read it for you with the click of the play button. I love this for reading email in the web version of Hey email as Hey aggregates email into a scrolling feed, making it easy to plow through lots of email quickly. I also use it for reading longform articles on the web whether I've saved them to Speechify or I'm just reading them in the browser. Speechify also has a mobile app for Android and iOS so you can listen to articles and books you've saved to your Speechify library.
Both tools allow you to pick your voice of choice and customize the speed of playback. Speechify offers more voices and even has celebrity options if you're into that. The AI enhanced voices offer a bit more nuance in inflection and are little bit more enjoyable to listen to than the standard voices, but all the voices are worlds better than TTS speech voices were even just a few years ago. Since TTS is Speechify's existential purpose, you'd expect it to have more options than Readwise, and it does. But Readwise's voices, especially the new V7 beta voices, are also very good and easy to listen to. TTS is an area of rapid improvement, and I expect voices to get even better with new iterations.
I use both of these tools every day and I pay for subscriptions to unlock all of their features. This is not an ad. I don't have any affiliate links and I'm getting no financial benefit from writing and talking about them. I just think they're handy tools that might also benefit you if you find yourself wanting to read more but can't always pay attention to a screen.
Check them out in my YouTube video below.
