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            Listen Later Adds Features Requested by TidBITS Readers

   Adam Engst

   Yalim Gerger of Listen Later, one of our current sponsors, recently
   shared some interesting news. After we published '[1]Text-to-Podcast
   Service Listen Later Sponsoring TidBITS' (11 March 2024), TidBITS
   readers made additional feature suggestions and bug fixes that he has
   now incorporated.

   As a reminder, [2]Listen Later enables you to submit messages (such as
   a TidBITS issue or other email newsletter), links to Web articles,
   text-heavy images, or PDFs by email to turn them into podcast episodes
   you can listen to in your favorite podcast app. It's a compelling use
   of AI tools, which convert the text into a natural-sounding voice after
   pre-processing to remove unnecessary bits.

   Thanks to your suggestions, Listen Later now provides a setting that
   adds outro music (licensed from a German composer) to the end of every
   podcast episode. It's a minor tweak, but one that's surprisingly
   welcome when you have several episodes queued up. It prevents your
   podcast app from jumping from the end of one to the start of the next
   with no pause, which can be disconcerting.

   TidBITS readers also devised a clever workaround for the problem of
   Listen Later not being able to access text behind a website paywall.
   Instead of sending a link to the article, save the article as a PDF and
   send that to Listen Later. Creating a PDF is easy on the Mac, where
   browsers often have an Export as PDF option, or you can use File >
   Print and save as PDF. On the iPhone or iPad, the same trick works'when
   viewing the page, tap the Share button, tap Print, and in the Print
   Preview screen, tap the Share button again, but this time select your
   email app to create a new message with the PDF attached.

   Finally, a new [3]Listen Later Extension for Chromium-based browsers
   makes submitting an article to Listen Later even easier. Once you add
   it to your browser and log in on the first usage, activating the
   extension sends the current page for audio conversion.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://tidbits.com/2024/03/11/text-to-podcast-service-listen-later-sponsoring-tidbits/
   2. https://www.listenlater.net/?referrer=tidbits
   3. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/listen-later-extension/mlllongbdcjgbidfjnehgjnpiflfhhmm?hl=en&authuser=0

   Hidden links:
   4. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2024/04/Listen-Later-paywall-workaround-scaled.jpg

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