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Kyle Galbraith
Kyle Galbraith

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at parler.io

Embed parler.io Audio Directly into Your Own Blog Posts

You may have seen that some of my recent posts here on dev.to have included an embedded audio player at the top. This is a new liquid tag that I contributed over on the dev.to repo.

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Welcome to the Forem codebase, the platform that powers dev.to. We are so excited to have you. With your help, we can build out Forem’s usability, scalability, and stability to better serve our communities.

What is Forem?

Forem is open source software for building communities. Communities for your peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends, and any other time and space where people need to come together to be part of a collective See our announcement post for a high-level overview of what Forem is.

dev.to (or just DEV) is hosted by Forem. It is a community of software developers who write articles, take part in discussions, and build their professional profiles. We value supportive and constructive dialogue in the pursuit of great code and career growth for all members. The ecosystem spans from beginner to advanced developers, and all are welcome to find their place…

The tag allows you to embed your converted audio from parler.io, a text to speech conversion service I have been building directly into your post here.

Parler is a side project I have been actively working on in my spare time. The goal is to convert written content into an audio format that can then be published, embedded, and shared onto other platforms. A future release will be aimed at doing the conversions automatically by watching your blog feed.

Now that you know what it is and how it can help you out, let's run through how you get parler audio into your own blog posts.

How to add parler audio to your own dev.to blog posts

  1. Get your RSS feed from here on dev.to or your own blog. Your dev.to feed can be found here: https://dev.to/feed/<your-username>.
  2. Enter the feed into parler.io
  3. Click convert on your blog post. This can take a few minutes to process.
  4. Once your blog post is converted into audio, grab the URL of the audio near the bottom of the page.

parler.io audio download link

Once your post has been converted by Parler you can then embed it here on dev.to using the Liquid tag below.

{% parler https://www.parler.io/audio/73240183203/ab59b90c45cd1f2144291f1a1cfd69894f87aabf.e466ec75-50e8-47c9-b376-55122f2e3a08.mp3 %}

Save your post and share your awesome content in audio format as well as in written form.

parler audio player

It's worth noting that you can also embed your converted audio into other sites as well. This can be done by copying <iframe> code from your conversion screen and pasting it into your desired site.

What is coming next for parler.io?

Right now Parler is in alpha release while I gather feedback from users like yourselves. The intention is to extend it with more features like batch conversions, selectable voices, and an enhanced embed player in the MVP and beyond.

If you have any questions or feedback please feel free to drop me a comment below. There is also a mailing list on the parler.io landing page that you can subscribe to in order to stay up to date on new developments.

Top comments (13)

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jess profile image
Jess Lee • Edited

This.is.so.cool.

Just played around with it on this post:

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

This was pretty funny 😂

How do we teach this robot to pronounce dev.to as "DEV TOO"?

Also @kylegalbraith request for feature: speed up to 1.5x 2x etc.

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kylegalbraith profile image
Kyle Galbraith

It is possible to train the voices on the pronunciation of certain words, acronyms, etc. I have been thinking about what a good UI mechanism is to allow users to specify that. Very much open to ideas around this.

Noted, 1.5x, 2x, etc for the embedded player. Thank you for the great feedback and wonderful community @ben @jess .

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jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

I can help you with this as I have already done it.

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kylegalbraith profile image
Kyle Galbraith

Thank you for the offer Jochem. I will keep this in mind as I start looking into that functionality.

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jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

Would you be so kind as to answer my other question?

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florimondmanca profile image
Florimond Manca

This is brilliant. The direct integration into DEV is an outstanding concept. I've already added a Parler tag in my latest post!

Some constructive feedback:

  • The voice quality is very good. I hope more voices will be available in the future, but it would also be useful to have previews of each voice. :-)
  • I'm looking forward to the watch feature. More specifically, I'd love it if Parler could detect edits to our blog posts, and re-render the audio automatically. (Perhaps us a "refresh" button on Parler might be sufficient at first.) Only thing is that the link shouldn't change so that existing integrations don't break.

Great stuff!

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kylegalbraith profile image
Kyle Galbraith

Thank you for the great feedback! More voices are likely to come in the future and once the MVP is out you will be able to select a voice to use for automatic conversions moving forward. I have not thought about refreshing the audio after an edit has been made but it certainly could be something that gets implemented in the future.

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jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

Kyle, are these SAPI5 voices on Windows, some other type or are you using an external service/api? I would like more information. I've been working with speech synthesis sporadically for several years now and this parler thing is neat. :)

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kylegalbraith profile image
Kyle Galbraith

The voices in Parler are a combination of services rather than native machine SAPI voices.

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jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

Okay then I am curious which services they are and whether you want more.

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kylegalbraith profile image
Kyle Galbraith

Shoot me a DM on Twitter and let's chat.

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sunilaleti profile image
Sunil Aleti

I created something like this Audio Blogs

You can check the blogpost here for detailed explanation