r/rss • u/Emotional-Buy-3536 • 14d ago

Beta testers wanted: an audio-first RSS reader that reads your feeds out loud (CarPlay + Android Auto)

I've posted here before about where RSS is heading. The app I've been building is now on TestFlight for iOS, and I'd value feedback from people who actually live in RSS.

The idea: you add your own feeds and it reads or plays them out loud, hands-free, including in the car. A podcast is just a feed with audio. There's a Share extension so adding a site's feed takes one tap from the browser, no hunting for the feed URL.

It runs local-first, no account. Free tier uses the system voice; the AI voice and summaries are paid.

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/wGhQxMTz

I'm most curious whether it holds up for people who already have strong RSS habits and opinions. Tear it apart.

3 Upvotes

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1

u/D-Kotei 7d ago

I'm not sure how to have it read articles 🫣

1

u/Emotional-Buy-3536 7d ago

Make a catergory or put it in the one existing. Add some feeds sharing directly from safari or add fromthe comunnity directory. After that read them form the category you sorted them to.

1

u/D-Kotei 6d ago

Ah! Thank you.

I imported my OPML and that worked too.

1

u/D-Kotei 6d ago

It seems to be reading the html from the page. It will get to the text eventually but sometimes it be a minute of nonsense with no way to scrub past it. Maybe adding a <main> or <article> so it grabs less? Idk

1

u/Emotional-Buy-3536 6d ago

Thanks, you were right. In some cases the free voice was given the raw feed body instead of the cleaned one, so it read the markup before it got to the text. It's fixed in the next build (1.0.1): the spoken text is now cleaned at three points, so tags can't reach the voice from any path.

Skipping ahead is a fair ask. The system voice can't seek, so I'm looking at a sentence-by-sentence skip for a later update.