Hacker NewsThey started to fill up my inbox so I did the responsible thing and created a rule that moved them to a dedicated folder "Newsletters". Now I don't read any.
It dawned on me that I'm far more likely to listen to a podcast than read a newsletter. What if I could take all those unread newsletters and turn them into my own personal podcast?
So I built Unread. You forward your newsletters to a unique address, and turn them into a conversational podcast episode covering everything you didn't read. You subscribe to the RSS feed in whatever podcast app you already use.
It was a fun project to build (you can get more details at https://x.com/benfosterdev). Some of the more interesting technical pieces:
- Postmark for incoming emails - Cloudflare for hosting everything - really enjoyed their durable workflow framework - Supabase for DB and Auth - React frontend - Claude for content extraction, synthesising, research and script writing - Google Gemini TTS for generating audio (nice support for SSML)
I started with ElevenLabs for TTS. It was great and pretty realistic but way too expensive. OpenAI TTS was okay, but barely. Gemini 2.5 TTS hit the quality/price point on the mark (listen for yourself) and has enough control that you can create conversational sounding content instead of two robots talking in a vacuum.
There's still a lot of refinement to be done on the script/audio side of things to make it more engaging and human-like but I'm already using it daily to get my tech updates.
Next important feature will be to schedule episode creation.
You get 5 free episode credits on sign up. Feedback appreciated.
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