I've been wanting the Chronicle to speak back, not just because it's fun tech, but because hearing a voice changes how a story lands. For readers who can't (or don't want to) stare at a screen, audio is a softer doorway into the work. For me, it's a way to keep pushing the project's accessibility forward while giving myself another systems challenge to chew on.

This initial version leans on a straightforward pipeline: take the post content, hash it, send it to a text-to-speech provider, and stash the resulting MP3 in "Netlify Blobs". My blog engine reads a simple map to know when a post has audio, and a special back-end function streams it to the page. If the words haven't changed, the hashes stay put and nothing regenerates. If they do, a quick sync updates the blob and the map, and Bob's your uncle.

Right now the voice is a stock default model because it let me move fast and get something working. The next step is training a local model on my own voice so the Chronicle sounds like me instead of a robot queen. And for the stories that matter most (short fiction, readings of lore, or anything that wants a human performance) I'm keeping the pipeline flexible enough to drop in manually recorded audio whenever that feels right.

It's a small thing, but hearing the world speak makes it feel more alive, and it keeps the door open for everyone who prefers to listen in.

Did you listen to this post? What do you think?