Input sources¶
You can do a one-off reading by indicating the source content with one of the following:
bard --text "Hello world, how are you today"
bard --clipboard
bard --url "example.com" # also accepts file://
bard --html-file /path/to/downloaded.html # access a page with paywall, download it, feed it to bard
bard --pdf-file /path/to/document.pdf # careful if you pay for it... (the full thing will be transcribed even if you listen to a small bit of it)
bard --audio-file /path/to/audio.mp3 # no actual request, only useful for testing the audio player
The above command will still launch the system tray icon, and so provide access to the audio player's (basic) controls.
Clipboard parsing¶
The clipboard parsing capabilities are elaborate enough so that it can detect an
URL, a file path or common HTML markup. If a file path is detected, the
extension is checked for .html-ish and .pdf, and the data is extracted
accordingly. Here we make good use of the most useful work on
readability.
In particular, this allows relatively easy reading out of webpages behind
paywalls, by right-clicking on "View Page Source" (or download the html file if
the source doesn't contain the text), select all text, copy and just proceed
with bard's "Process Copied Text" or --clipboard options. For other articles
not protected by a paywall, copying the URL should suffice.
Resume and cleanup¶
You can resume the previous recording (the audio won't play right away in this case, but you can use the reader):
You can also ask the app to remove your (local) traces: