Hi, I'm Phil Freo

I built a quick mashup/integration between two services that I love using, that I thought would be “better together”. It’s live at ArticleListen.com.

I use Pocket to save a queue of any article (blog post, news story, etc.) that I see on Hacker News, Twitter, Facebook, etc. There’s a web & mobile browser extensions for saving articles you see, and Mac & iOS apps for reading these articles later all in one place, even offline.

Using Pocket can be good for productivity because you may see a headline that interests you, but you really shouldn’t be reading it now. By saving it to Pocket you know you can easily find and read it later. I’ve got a few hundred articles saved from over the past couple years. I often read a few articles at a time, but they still build up.

I also use Umano, which is a service that has professional voice actors record narrated articles from across the web. It’s perfect for commuting. Many of the articles are only a few minutes long, so even a quick trip to the store or walking to the train can be enough to hear an article or two about something that interests you. Tech, current news, etc.

Umano has some article discovery built in (a “popular” page and a way to see which articles your Facebook friends on Umano liked), however they have thousands of articles already recorded and so finding what you really want to listen to is still difficult.

Then I realized that all the articles I wanted to read or listen to were already saved in my Pocket queue, so during part of a couple weekends I put together this site to do a few things:

• Look through my Pocket queue and identify which articles were already on Unman
• Allow me to very easily add matching articles to my “playlist” in Umano
• Also allow me to “Vote” in Umano for the articles that are already in my queue
• Add “tags” into Pocket for articles that were added to my Umano playlist, so I can easily archive those in Pocket

Umano does have a Chrome extension (and generic bookmarklet) for “voting” for articles, but I wanted my primary queue to be something like Pocket, which is better built for general purpose article saving, I didn’t want to have to save every article to two places, and I mostly wanted to listen to the articles that were already in my queue.

Check it out: ArticleListen.com

Feedback is welcome.

Built using Python/Flask and Bootstrap.

Future improvements I’d like to make: It should continually monitor a Pocket queue for new articles ongoing – looking for matches and adding them to Umano without any user interaction. At the moment you just have to login to the site occasionally.