11 years ago, I had the idea that I should be able to take any article on an arbitrary website and listen to it as a narration in my chosen podcast player. At the time, text-to-speech (TTS) services were very robotic and it was difficult to listen to anything longer than 10 seconds. But now that TTS is much better, long form narrations are actually quite pleasant to listen to, so I gave it another go.
There's a browser extension that reads the content of the article on the page (only when you activate it, using least privilege browser APIs for content scripts) and then narrates the article for you. You get a custom podcast RSS URL that works in (almost) any podcast player, and then you can take articles with you to catch up while driving, walking the dog, etc. All the typical podcast audio controls you're used to like speed settings, skipping, and no new apps to download or learn.
It has genuinely been a big benefit and allowed me to keep up with articles I'd never normally have time to read, plus it allows me to reduce my screen time. My wife also uses and loves it. There have been some interesting bugs in the narration like originally pronouncing "24/7" as "twenty-four sevenths" but I am working through different strategies to get more accurate narration from arbitrary long-form text.
With apologies for the ".AI" domain, it was a bit of an impulse buy: https://earcast.ai/