Article Features Request

[Xelions]

TechSpot has always been my go-to for tech articles and will continue to be hopefully for many years to come. I'd love to see some new features, and if anyone else in the community would like to add to this very short list of requests please do so.

• AI text to speech link where I could listen to the article in question, or even read by the author
• Sprite indicating whether an article is popular, eg flame icon, trending etc, by subject/category.
• Print option, but I'm willing to settle on having the ability to download the article as a formatted PDF, eg for your hardware breakdowns, the lengthy articles particularly - sit back enjoy reading on a tablet with a beverage I would really love to see some quarterly magazine compilation and even willing to pay, obviously for specific articles.

If anything else comes to mind I'll add my thoughts to another post

PS
I decided it was time to support the TechSpot Staff and upgrade to Elite - even though I feel that it's such a small contribution -, and by doing this I'd like to extend my thanks and appreciation to all the TechSpot staff over the many years I've read your articles. I feel that journalism today, can be a field that is under paid and valued. There will always be good and bad articles but I feel for the most part TechSpot has done a great job. Thanks once again!

 

[Julio Franco]

Thanks for the support and positive feedback. Also for upgrading to Elite, I'm sure you will enjoy how fast the site loads without ads

About the three suggestions, I will give you my personal opinion and why some of those are not implemented natively on the site. In a different order:

1) Sprite indicating whether an article is popular, eg flame icon, trending etc...
Maybe we should make this more obvious, but we do have that already. The first item on the menu "Trending" loads the most popular stories in the past week and there's a tab that lets you see the most popular stories in the past 30 days, too. Flame icon included, see the screenshot.





In the TechSpot frontpage, we also offer the option to see the latest stories vs. the most popular ones.

2 & 3) Text to speech / Print option
We had a print option many moons ago, and it was a very niche use case. Perhaps it's something we could implement somewhat easily for Elite members. If you have suggestions of how to implement this best we are all ears (e.g. if you use a third party service that does this for you, we could check out the output and try to mimic that in our own template).

For the Text to speech option, I've seen a ton of websites implement this in the past 2-3 years (using third-party engines) and almost all of them have eventually dropped it. I have to assume it's because, again, very niche use. I feel like most people wanting to do this kind of translation can rely on a third-party service which will be better than the ones we could use, and it will be properly updated and improved over time.

Knowing that we have limited resources for development, most of those efforts usually go to platform optimizations (performance, compatibility), a little design work, and usually up to 1 big project per year. Our most recent one is the TechSpot DB (see the announcement below) which we hope to expand to at least one more product category by Q1/26:

https://www.techspot.com/news/110205-introducing-techspot-db-smarter-way-explore-hardware-performance.html