Listnr is a tool that I intend to use to quickly turn my blog posts into a podcast with little effort. No need to fear if my pronunciation isn't clear or not loud enough.

Listnr is pretty generous with their offer; 45,000 words a month for just one code. That's more than enough for most of us. Not to mention unused credits would roll over to the following months. Wow.

I have just purchased one code and did a few quick tests with it, and here's why I will wait for Listnr to mature a little more before using it for production use.

More localised voice selection

There's already quite a good selection of artificial voices in Listnr (160+), but I'm going to wait a little longer before using it in production. The reason being, there's currently only two localised voice (one male and one female voice each) for my language I want to use; Singapore English. It's not that the conversion quality is bad; it just that they sound too US English still.

I also tested the Malay and Chinese voices, and they'rere actually pretty good.

Granular voice generation controls

Voice generation technology is still not perfect when it comes to intonation, and it may never will. Hence I would like Listnr to have the feature to allow users to highlight text for emphasis - whether reading should be faster/slower, louder/softer, etc.

I'm quite optimistic that Anan and his team would improve Listnr.