Ardio

Paste in a link and Ardio reads the page's source, pulling out the article text while filtering the noise: ads, recommended articles, footer junk. It then converts the clean text to an MP3 with Google Text-to-Speech and drops it on the page with a player, so you can listen right there without downloading anything.

I designed Ardio to handle several users at once, which meant the conversion functions had to run concurrently, so I dug into threading. I also added error handling: paste an incompatible link and instead of crashing, the site re-renders with a message so you can try again.

I learned how to run functions concurrently, stand up a Flask server, and collect input from text fields.

Down the road: a language switcher, support for more outlets like Global News and CNN, and a voice that sounds less robotic and more human.