I always found Verge’s “Listen to this article” intriguing, so I finally gave in and clicked on it. From the looks (and sounds haha) of it, it seems to be entirely auto-generated. I didn’t dig too deeply, but the computer synthesized voice sounded really good. An example can be seen here:
Something I plan to add to my never-ending backlog of side projects on this site is maybe adding something similar here as well. I played with the demo here (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech), and it seems like it might do the trick