Narro.co: Turn articles into podcasts

Listen to your bookmarked blog articles just like a podcast.

Everyone seems to be trying to read more these days with the #10pagesADay seeing an uptick in trendiness lately. It’s seemingly a reasonable amount and if you are consistent with it, can add to a pretty shocking number of books you could read a year.

I like the idea of reading more, but managing my time between training clients 7–10 hours a day, programming for clients an hour a day, my daily commuting time, performing my own workouts, and all the other daily nonsense, can be tough to choose where to spend your reading time.

Blogs, articles, and other shorter form content can be just as beneficial to the learning process or critical thinking process as reading books. More often than not these shorter form readings can expose you to multiple thought processes surrounding a similar topic, and that can be a huge advantage to your ability to digest the information with a more well-rounded understanding of the material.

The Problem with reading.

Sometimes the best option to learn is to listen to the material. As personal trainers, we tend to be pretty active and holding a book during light activity, and commuting time isn't a realistic option.

Audio-only podcasts have been the growing medium to consume information in the last few years. Some people are even narrating their own articles into new podcasts as a way to generate more content from stuff they already shared through a different medium.

Let me introduce you to Narro!

Narro allows you to take written articles from the web and create an audio podcast feed that you can play through any podcast player. You don’t have to wait for the author to create an audio version of their own article, or add to the endless list of bookmarked articles in your reading list.

It’s amazingly simple to use.

Narro has a native mobile app available for Android and Apple devices if you need to submit articles to be converted to the narration.

Narro also has a web extension for chrome browsers, a bookmarklet, integrations with IFTTT, Pocket, Instapaper, RSS feeds, and youtube audio extraction, and you can send from your linked email address.

When you’re ready to listen to the articles you had narrated, simply add your custom feed link to any podcast player you like. Then download or stream new episodes just as you would from any other podcast show.

Who narrates the articles?

An AI-powered voice does. Not an actual human. Now, these aren’t your run-of-the-mill robot voices of the past. Even the voices available on the free plan sound quite good when listening.

You can demo the voices available on the free and paid plan here.

However, the “Pro version” of Narro does have voices that sound a lot more natural in their cadence of speech. Listen to the “Classic” voices if you want to have a good laugh, or see how far we have come with these audio voices over the years.

If you want to see, hear, and experience audio articles that I am listening to, add this URL to your podcast player in order to subscribe to my feed.

I have their Pro plan for my account and find it very affordable to use. At the time of this writing, the price is set at $2/hour of audio converted. Each article I have submitted has been between a 5–20 minute read, so the cost is pretty low to have a few articles narrated each month.