We Don't Just Narrate

If you take a typical email newsletter and run it through a text-to-speech engine, you'll quickly find that articles are made for eyes, not ears. A footnote marker interrupts a sentence with a baffling "one." A paragraph declares "as you can see in the chart below" — and then you hear nothing, because most charts aren't text. Numbered lists get dropped or handled rigidly and robotically. We fix all of that.

One of my favorite things about Earmail is that it doesn't just read the text in your newsletters — it adapts it for audio. Footnotes get intelligently woven in right where they belong, the way an author would have included them if he/she had been talking. Charts and tables can get summarized in plain speech, so you actually get the point the author was making instead of missing critical context. Lists get read the way a person would actually read them to you.

We also add chapter markers throughout each episode, so (in most podcast apps) you can easily skip between sections — particularly useful for digest-style newsletters that cover multiple topics where you only care about a couple of them.

When I say Earmail episodes aren't just run through a basic text-to-speech converter, this is what I mean. Our goal is that what you hear feels like the article — complete, in order, with nothing important left behind — even though what you sent us was inherently built for a screen. If you ever hit an episode where this process didn't work, please tell me about it (there's a feedback link on every episode page). Your reports are how Earmail keeps improving.

Jeff