MAGAZINE
Listen to articles read aloud, in the car or on the train
There’s a moment in the day the web has never known how to fill: when your eyes are occupied. The steering wheel, the handlebars, the RER platform, the sink, the stairs of a hospital at six in the morning. At that moment, the screen is no use — and your ears are doing nothing.
That’s exactly the space sound fills. And that’s why we’re opening Terondo to listening.
The time that didn’t count
Forty minutes commuting, twice a day, five days a week. Do the math: that’s more than 130 hours a year. One hundred and thirty hours that, until now, were spent waiting — looking out the window, thumb mindlessly scrolling through a list you’d have forgotten before you arrived.
There’s a feeling familiar to everyone who listens to something good on the way: the journey gets shorter. You look up and you’re already there. The time wasn’t killed; it was filled — and you get out of the car knowing something you didn’t know when you got in. It’s one of technology’s rare, honest magic tricks: making time that would have been lost useful, without stealing a minute from the rest of life.
What’s already here today
We’re not announcing a project: part of it is already live as you read these lines.
Articles can be read aloud. Tap the speaker button beside the text, and your device’s voice takes over. Choose a voice once, and it’s remembered on that device. Nothing to install, nothing to pay for, no account: the reading happens in your browser, not on our servers.
Audio guides go everywhere with you. The site introduction, the tour of hidden features, and the discovery steps no longer live only on the homepage: they’re available from any page, behind an icon, ready to start with a tap.
And the underlying technology is already in place. For weeks, we’ve been producing our internal reports in neural voices, with multiple speakers, and streaming them through a player that resumes partway through a file — the exact machinery of a podcast. It’s running for the team today; tomorrow, it will carry the public episodes.
What’s coming, and what we’re not claiming is already done
Let’s be precise, because a site that announces more than it delivers wears out fast. There’s no subscription feed yet, no public episodes in the catalog, and you won’t find us in your usual podcast app yet. These three things are the next steps, in this order: first, episodes you can listen to on the site; then a feed you can subscribe to; finally, a presence wherever you already listen.
What we already know is what they’ll be about, because it’s what we do every day: the history of waves and screens, behind the scenes at radio stations around the world, what you discover when you open a webcam on the other side of the planet, and the magazine’s articles — read aloud, not summarized.
No ads shouting between sentences
We need to talk about what listening has become elsewhere. A thirty-minute show interrupted three times by an ad shouted twice as loud as the voice before it. Recommendations that recommend nothing except what someone paid to promote. The same ad heard forty times in a week, until you know it by heart.
We’re not pretending Terondo will live on love and fresh water: the site is free, it has to pay for its servers, and there will be ad placements. But two commitments hold, written in black and white into the way we work: nothing that cuts someone off in the middle of a sentence, and a Pro plan with no ads at all for those who’d rather pay for quiet. Between the two, never that modern compromise of making the free experience so unpleasant that it pushes you to subscribe: that’s not a business model, it’s a hostage situation.
And behind the wheel, a sentence that matters
Sound is the only format that accompanies you while driving. All the more reason to say it clearly: start listening before you set off, or by voice. No phone in hand, no menu to scroll through at a red light. We design our pages with that in mind — a large button, within thumb’s reach, playback that resumes where it stopped, and nothing that requires you to look at the screen to continue.
That’s also why audio feels like us. Terondo was born from a simple idea: to open windows onto the world, for free, without an account, without barriers. A voice in your headphones is one more window — the one that opens when you can’t look.
— The Terondo editorial team
