By: Donald Lee
Date: November 4th - 17th 2020
Ardio is a web application that converts CTV News articles into mp3 files. Currently, this only works for CTV, but in the future, I am planning on expanding it to more news soruces such as Global News or CNN.
After inserting a link into the text box, Ardio will look into the website's source code and extract text while filtering text that are not apart of the article. This includes, ads, reccomended articles, and footer information. Once the article is filtered, Ardio will convert the text into an mp3 file using the Google Text To Speak module. The mp3 file will then be displayed on the website alongside an mp3 player, so you can listen on the website, without having to download anything.
Because I planned for this application to be used by mutiple users at once, I needed to ensure that my functions can run consecutively. This led me to research about threading. Additionally, if a user enters in a link that is incompatible with the website, the website would crash. As a result, I implemented a method that would catch errors, and rerender the site alongside an error message. This way, the user would be able to try again.
From this project, I learned how to run mutiple functions consecutively, how to set up a Flask server, and collect data input from text fields.
In the future, I plan to implement the ability to change the language of the article, make this compatible with other news outlets such as Global News, CNN, etc, and make the voice less robotic and more human like!