We Don't Just Read Your Email Aloud

If you take a typical email newsletter and run it through a text-to-speech engine, you'll quickly discover that articles are made for eyes, not ears. A footnote marker interrupts a sentence with a baffling "one." A paragraph confidently says "as you can see in the chart below" — and then you hear nothing, because a chart isn't text. A numbered list comes out as a robotic monotone of "one... two... three..." that no human reading to you would ever say.

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

Episodes also get chapter markers, so (in most podcast apps) you can skip between sections of a long article just like you'd skim a page — useful when a digest-style newsletter covers five topics and you only care about a couple.

When I say Earmail episodes aren't just run through a converter, this is what I mean. The goal is that what comes out of your headphones feels like the article — complete, in order, with nothing important left behind — even though what went in was built for a screen. If you ever hit an episode where something didn't translate well to audio, tell me about it (there's a feedback link on every episode page). Those reports are exactly how this keeps getting better.

Jeff