01 — Intake
Send or forward content
An authorized user sends content to the Herald email workflow. Herald uses Gmail access to identify and retrieve messages intended for the service.
A product by Upstate Data Systems LLC
Turn what you need to read into something you can listen to.
Herald is an email-to-podcast automation service that transforms emails, newsletters, articles, notes, and other written content into spoken audio for listening away from the screen.
What Herald does
Herald lets authorized users send or forward content by email and receive a listenable audio episode in return. It is designed to make long-form written material easier to consume when reading is inconvenient.
Workflow
How Herald works
A streamlined automated pipeline turning submitted written content into finished, high-fidelity audio.
02 — Scripting
Turn the source into a spoken script
Herald prepares the submitted source for narration and uses the Google Gemini API to transform it into a structured podcast script appropriate to the requested format.
03 — Synthesis
Generate the audio
Speech synthesis is performed by Herald's privately operated text-to-speech service. The narration is assembled into a finished audio episode.
04 — Delivery
Deliver the result
Herald uploads the completed episode to the user's configured Google Drive location and sends an email response with the result and, when appropriate, a link to the stored audio.
Integration & Permissions
Google services used by Herald
Herald uses Google APIs only to provide features requested by the user.
Gmail
- Identify and retrieve messages submitted for Herald processing.
- Read the message content and related metadata needed to process the request.
- Send acknowledgments, status messages, and completed-episode replies.
Google Drive
- Upload completed podcast audio to the configured Drive location.
- Store the Drive file identifier and link needed to deliver or resume the completed job.
Google API Data & Privacy Protection: Herald requests Google access through OAuth. Upstate Data Systems does not sell Google user data, use it for advertising, or use it to train generalized artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models.
For complete details about access, processing, storage, retention, and deletion, read the Herald Privacy Policy.
Data Protection
Privacy and control
Herald is designed around a narrow workflow: receive content that a user intentionally submits, transform that content into an audio episode, and deliver the result. Submitted content is not automatically published as a public podcast feed.
Google user data is used only as necessary to provide or support this user-facing functionality, maintain service security, troubleshoot failures, and comply with applicable law.
Users can revoke Herald's Google access through their Google Account permissions. Users can also request deletion of Herald-held information by contacting Upstate Data Systems LLC.
Support & Inquiries
About and support
Herald is developed and operated by Upstate Data Systems LLC.
Support and privacy inquiries:
upstatedatasystems@gmail.com