If you have any trouble with the app, feed free to contact us, or you can open an issue on GitHub.
- What ClipCast Does
- How to add your ClipCast feed to your podcast app
- How to add content
- Why Some Content Doesn't Work
- AI Text-to-Speech: Pretty good, but not perfect
What ClipCast Does
ClipCast turns web content that you provide (links or text) into natural-language audio and puts it right into your podcast listening app of choice.
When would I use it?
Let's say your browsing the web and come across an interesting article that you don't have time to read. Simply send the link to ClipCast, and the article will be ready for you to listen to in your podcast app on your next walk, drive, or workout.
Will it read all the clutter on the article web page (like heading, navigation, footer, etc)?
ClipCast clips out just the content from links you provide - excluding ads, menus, footers and comments. It then uses AI to convert the text into natural-sounding speech, and then provides it to you in a podcast feed compatible with nearly all podcast apps. Or you can listen to it right on ClipCast.it...no app required!
Here is a short video explaining how ClipCast works:
How to add your ClipCast feed to your podcast app
ClipCast is compatible with nearly all podcast apps. Here's how to add your ClipCast feed to your podcast app. NOTE: Unfortunately Spotify is the only major podcast app that doesn't support adding RSS feeds.
In your ClipCast dashboard you'll find a link to your podcast feed. Simply copy the link...
...and paste it into your podcast app's "Add Podcast" form. Here is how to do it on Apple Podcasts:
Here's how to add the feed to your specific podcast app.
How to Add Content
Once you've added your feed to your podcast app, you'll want to add content to your feed. Here are a few ways to do it. Please note: once you've added content, it may take a few minutes to appear in your podcast app. Tip: you can refresh the feed in your podcast app to see the new content.
From a Link
To add content from a link, simply paste the link into the "Add Content" form on your ClipCast dashboard (which you will see after login/signup).
* Important Note: ClipCast can only access publicly-available URLs. I.e. it can't retrieve content protected by a login.
By E-Mail
Add content to your feed by e-mailing links or text to a custom email provided for you. The e-mail is available in your ClipCast dashboard.
Paste (or Enter) Text
To add content from text, simply paste the text into the "Add Content" textarea in the ClipCast dashboard.
With the Chrome Extension
Chrome desktop users can install the ClipCast Chrome extension to add content from any web page with a single click.
Why Some Content Doesn't Work
Most of the time, ClipCast will work with any publicly-available web page. However, there are a few reasons why it might not work:
- Content is behind a login or a pay wall
- Content is protected against automatic fetching: This means that the target site detects that the request is coming from a machine and blocks it. NYTimes.com and FT.com are examples of this.
- Content is not completely visible on initial page load: Often when you view an article it will show you a paragraph or two and then show a button "Click to read article". ClipCast is not able to detect these situations.
- Content is loaded client-side only: This means that when you fisit the article url, a secondary request is made to the server to load the content. ClipCast can only process server-rendered content (content provided on the initial request)
- Content on page is formatted in an atypical way: Occasionally, ClipCast will just not be able to understand the structure of a page it's given. This is fairly rare.
- Content is in a format that ClipCast can't read (like a PDF)
AI Text-to-Speech: Pretty good, but not perfect
ClipCast's Premium voices use AI to convert text to speech. Given a paragraph of text, the AI will sound as good as a human reading it. However, web pages are much more visual than just text. Images, graphs, charts and diagrams can cause the AI to stumble.
These elements are visual and won't be included in the audio. So if the text refers to the depictions, it may be a bit confusing. There are a couple ways to mitigate this:
- Before sending the content to ClipCast, glance at the depictions to get the context
- Click the "description" icon in your podcast player where you can find a link back to the original article (where you can see the depictions)