I love Substack’s new text-to-speech feature. I know there are at least a few subscribers out there who greatly appreciate this new functionality as well. Listening to something I've written feels very satisfying and I'm finding myself listening to more articles that I wouldn't have otherwise had the time to read.

While I've noticed only a few minor shortcomings with the AI readers—e.g., emphasis on areas where pauses are required, some mispronunciations, and the inability to spell out abbreviations and acronyms—I am impressed and grateful for this functionality.

Substack Hamish McKenzie Chris Best, might these perhaps be tweaked in the future:

1) Enable writers to designate phrases to be written and read one way but spoken another. For instance, "During the Cretaceous period ~90 mya lived a ferocious creature known as the mosasaur" would be written as such but could further spell out/signal to the AI to read '~' for ‘approximately’ and 'mya' for ‘millions of years ago.’

2) Enable writers to highlight sections of text for the AI reader to skip and allow one to designate the beginning and endpoints of text to be read.

Just a couple of initial thoughts.

I am Sincerely grateful to the Substack team for implementing this feature. Keep up the wonderful enhancements to Substack. Cheers!