Six Colors wouldn’t work without direct support from our members.
Over the years we’ve added a bunch of new members-only features to the site. Our weekly podcast has proven to be very popular, so much so that it made me realize that a lot of members are perhaps a bit more inclined to consume podcasts than reading what we write with their eyeballs.
As a result, I’ve built a new “Six Colors Audio Newsletter” podcast feed. Using the same logic as our regular members-only email newsletter, it posts an episode any day there’s at least one full story on the site. Any day we’ve got stuff on the site, a new Audio Newsletter episode drops, complete with introduction and chapter markers per story. Here’s a link to a sample episode.
The Audio Newsletter uses a high-quality text-to-speech engine, so it’s not a human reader, but I’m surprised at how good it is. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking the script to make the output better, including alternating two different high-quality voices, using additional voices for lengthy quotes from other sources, calling out footnotes explicitly, and even switching to a “read every character” mode when stuff is posted in code font, which happens frequently in Help Me, Glenn! columns. And the refining of the script continues!
