Today ArticleFM is live on the App Store. It is an iPhone app that takes a link to an article and hands it back as audio you can listen to: on the commute, at the gym, on a walk, or on a train too crowded to hold a phone up in.
This is the first public release. Here is what it does, how to get going in about a minute, and what we are working on next.
Why it exists
The person who built ArticleFM is a slow reader with a Chrome window full of tabs. Articles worth reading, saved with real intent, and then never returned to, because the time to sit and read them never quite arrives, and when it does, something shorter wins.
Listening solves that in a way that "saving for later" never did. The same article, narrated, fits into the hours of the day that reading cannot reach: the drive in, the forty minutes on the treadmill, the walk back from the shops. ArticleFM is the tool we built to make that a habit rather than a project. The about page has the longer version.
What is in the first release
- The share sheet. Open the article in Safari, Chrome, or any app with a share sheet, tap Share, choose ArticleFM. That is the whole import step. You can also paste a URL straight into the app.
- Background conversion. Send the article and carry on with whatever you were doing. A notification arrives when the audio is ready.
- A catalogue of narrator voices. A set of standard voices and a larger set of premium ones, all previewable before you commit an article to one. The catalogue is served from our side, so it grows without an app update.
- A transcript that scrolls in sync. The full text sits under the player and follows the narration, so you can find your place with a glance or read a paragraph properly when it deserves it.
- Six playback speeds. 0.75×, 1×, 1.25×, 1.5×, 1.75× and 2×, changeable mid-article.
- A library, with offline downloads. Everything you convert is kept with its artwork and audio. Save an article to the device and it plays with no connection at all.
- Background audio. Playback carries on with the screen locked and the phone in your pocket, like a podcast.
The how it works page walks through each of these with screenshots.
Getting started
- Download ArticleFM on your iPhone.
- Open the app and play one of the built-in sample articles, purely to hear what the voices sound like. No account is needed for that.
- Find an article you have been meaning to read, tap Share in your browser, and choose ArticleFM.
- Pick a narrator, wait for the notification, press play.
Every account gets 2 free articles to convert. That is a lifetime total rather than a monthly allowance, so you can try the app properly before deciding. A conversion that fails does not count against them. After that there is a single monthly subscription, ArticleFM Monthly, with the current price shown in the app before you subscribe and published in the subscription terms.
What it will not do
Every article-to-audio tool has pages it cannot read, and we would rather tell you up front. Conversion can fail when an article sits behind a login or paywall, is mostly video or images, is generated entirely by scripts, blocks automated readers, exceeds our per-article limit, or is a PDF rather than a web page. The support page lists the cases in detail. If a page you care about refuses to convert, send us the URL from the contact page. The stubborn ones are exactly what we want to see.
What comes next
The near-term work is unglamorous on purpose: better extraction on awkward pages, fewer failed conversions, and narration that holds up across a genuinely long read. We will write about what ships, what breaks, and what we decided not to build, here on the blog.
If you download it today, thank you. And if something is wrong, tell us. A first release is a first release, and the fastest way for it to get better is to hear from the people using it.