A Chrome extension called Podcast.ai enables you to convert browser tabs to podcasts. Sometimes. It’s easy enough to set up:
Go to https://podcastle.ai/
Sign up for a free account.
Add the extension to Chrome.
Click on a tab containing an article you’d like to listen to.
Click on the podcast.ai extension.
Click the Play arrow.
Sign up for free at the podcast.ai website. Graphic: podcast-ai Screenshot, by Terry Freedman
Convert text in tabs to podcasts. Graphic: podcast ai 03 screenshot, by Terry Freedman
You can queue the “podcasts”. Graphic: podcast ai screenshot by Terry Freedman
You have the choice of listening to a male or female voice. You can also download the recording as a podcast in mp3 format, share it via an embed code, or share it with a URL.
As far as reading text and converting it into speech is concerned, I must admit I was very impressed. In addition, you can continue clicking on tabs to listen to, and the podcast.ai extension will line them up to play one after the other. Thus, in theory you could put several articles in the queue and listen while you are doing the washing up.
However, I discovered that if an article starts with a graphic, its URL won’t convert at all, while if there are graphics in the article but not right at the beginning, it seems happy enough to simply skip over the offending illustrations and carry on reading the text.
I also discovered that it won’t read out any text which is anything other than normal text. What do I mean by this? I tried converting my review of Ethan Frome, which has several quotations in it. These quotations are not normal text: their text has been entered into something called a ‘quote block’:
Information is entered in ‘blocks’, one of which is a quote block.
Enter the quotation and where it comes from
This is how it looks in the editor
And this is the result as it appears to the reader:
“This is a quotation.”
Another drawback of the app is that you can’t change the voices, apart from being able to select either female or male, as I’ve already said.
Still, it’s free, and could be a time-saver by allowing you to listen while you work to news and other articles.
Finally, here is the recording I made of the Ethan Frome review using podcast.ai:
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