Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 121 posts

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#111

Post by Kwpolska »

diminikolaou wrote: post #109
Kwpolska wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In episode “August 10th, 2023 | Vim Boss”: 1. Vim Boss - the auto-generated description fails to mention the post author is a top Neovim contributor. It is hard to tell who Bram is just from the description. It also said “the deceased iconic software Vim” (Vim is not dead…) The music feels inappropriate. 2. The Future of the Vim Project - “In an exciting movement towards the next stage of Vim project’s evolution”? Wh…

Thank you for taking the time to go through this. I agree that there is room for improvement and your comment makes it clear what we can improve. But I disagree with the sentiment that it does not add value. There are 1k people that tune in daily to listen to this that would agree with me: https://op3.dev/show/f77aea62-97e5-5cce-92c6-9464e51c30c6 Definitely will add transcript. The HN Recap has been a side thing for…

You can find 1k views (or even 10k) under spammy auto-generated videos on YouTube too.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#112

Post by danielbln »

satvikpendem wrote: post #83
Kwpolska wrote: post #51

People like podcasts, because they are interesting stories told by humans. Good podcasts have a lot of creativity behind them. Your HN Recap podcast uses a bland voice that sometimes struggles with tech terms, and the auto-generated summaries often feature deep details and miss the intention of the story. Auto-generated content on YouTube is usually misleading spam, how will you prevent your auto-generated podcasts f…

Some people like those, some of the time. I too enjoy a good Conan or Hardcore History podcast but many other podcasts I listen to are basically audiobooks where, if the voice is good enough, I'll listen to them. History of Rome is a prime example, it's essentially a very long audiobook where the reading voice makes nearly no difference to me.

In fact, the voice narrating Hardcore History is so.. American (no offense to anyone), swapping in another voice would actually be an improvement for me.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#113

Post by sitkack »

vunderba wrote: post #108
diminikolaou wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG has not approved for this to be done with his own voice, which is why we're using a custom voice (Anna).

OPs question wasn't about using a custom trained voice. Did you receive approval to make a podcast from his written works at all?

If someone doesn’t answer your direct question, but answers a different question, then they effectively have answered your original question with no.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#114

Post by diminikolaou »

Kwpolska wrote: post #111
diminikolaou wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for taking the time to go through this. I agree that there is room for improvement and your comment makes it clear what we can improve. But I disagree with the sentiment that it does not add value. There are 1k people that tune in daily to listen to this that would agree with me: https://op3.dev/show/f77aea62-97e5-5cce-92c6-9464e51c30c6 Definitely will add transcript. The HN Recap has been a side thing for…

You can find 1k views (or even 10k) under spammy auto-generated videos on YouTube too.

Podcasts and Youtube Shorts have very different view count, I'm sure you know that.

In any case, it's clear that this podcast is not for you and that's ok.

Appreciate you taking the time to give us thoughtful feedback.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#116

Post by diminikolaou »

causi wrote: post #58

I wish there was more in this space geared toward audiobooks. There are so many brilliant novels in my collection that never got an audiobook release and it'd be amazing to be able to generate my own.

You can definitely use the platform for audiobooks. It's not native to importive an epub yet, but you can use the UI or the API to audify your book.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#117

Post by diminikolaou »

dutchbrit wrote: post #99

I was listening to an audiobook the other day on a commute that was also done with AI. The main issue I had was focus, the voice was very monotone to begin with, and at one point it pronounced “it” as “IT”. I didn’t finish listening… That said, the voice isn’t that bad in the HN example.

Thank you!

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#118

Post by diminikolaou »

swyx wrote: post #103

congrats on launching! i've been a vocal fan for a little bit: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1661848597728575489 however when i tried signing up for your pod to make my own, i was disappointed that it would only take manually entered content. i want to hook it up to my twitter or rss or discord feed, and have you Do The Thing. please!

Can't find a way to connect. Ping at hn@wondercraft.ai - would be keen to get your thing going.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#119

Post by ivan_icin »

anotherpaulg wrote: post #50
benzible wrote: post #29

Different but related idea, this creates a personal podcast feed: https://reca.st

I use Speech Central with the Azure voices for listening to web articles as audiobooks/podcasts. It works quite well and is basically free. The azure voices are excellent. The text extraction engine of Speech Central fails to pull all the content out of some webpages, which is the biggest downside to this solution. https://speechcentral.net/2023/04/14/harness-the-power-of-az...

[dead]

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#120

Post by [deleted] »

diminikolaou wrote: post #116
causi wrote: post #58

I wish there was more in this space geared toward audiobooks. There are so many brilliant novels in my collection that never got an audiobook release and it'd be amazing to be able to generate my own.

You can definitely use the platform for audiobooks. It's not native to importive an epub yet, but you can use the UI or the API to audify your book.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN