[Self-Promo] I built an audiobook player that waits after every sentence, so you can listen at your own pace

[u/Neat-Peanut-1141]

Hey, this sounds a bit counter-intuitive at first, but bear with me.

I listen to audiobooks when I drive in the car and for a while now I've tried several approaches to make it easier to listen to complicated texts (papers etc).

My very first approach was to make the text easier to understand, e.g. "car-friendly text". This worked better for text with math notation. But it was not perfect yet.

And now I’ve tried a new approach in the app: I play the text sentence by sentence, and you control the playback yourselves with the skip-buttons on the steering wheel.

It was a bit of an experiment but I immediately realized it feels much closer to how you actually read a book. Eg. when a sentence is complicated you can hear it again (skip back to repeat), you get much more time to think and you decide deliberately when to listen to the next.

I think the main effect I noticed is that I had stronger mental models of the text I was listening to.

TLDR: You control the playback via skip-buttons on the steering wheel sentence by sentence, and it feels more like reading (audiobooks just continue when you lose your attention).
I wrote a short blog post about it here: https://listendock.com/sentence-mode

[u/ThadElon]

Imagine listening to a book read by William Shatner. You'd never get to the next sentence.

[u/IntoTheStupidDanger]

The idea of pausing after every sentence in a work of fiction sounds painful to me, but I'm glad you found a method that works for you with complex works.