51–60 of 251 posts
English is particularly bad to read aloud because it is like programming language Fortran based on immutable tokens. If you want tonal variety, you have to understand the content.
Some other languages modify the tokens themselves, so just one word can be pompous, comical, uneducated etc.
One problem I see with this is legitimizing LLM-extracted content as canon. The realistic human speech masks the fact that the LLM might be hallucinating or highlighting the wrong parts of a book/paper as important.
The top list of Apple Podcasts is full of real humans intentionally lying or manipulating information, it makes me worry much less about computer generated lies
There are hacks everywhere but humans lying sometimes have implications (libel/slander) that we can control. Computers are thought of in general society as devoid of bias and "smart" so if they lie people are more likely to listen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being auto-generated is not the problem. I listen to a lot of text-to-speech voiced articles and epub books now. The problem is that filtering/searching on that massive catalog and weeding the useless stuff out.
Are you doing that with "old-fashioned" TTS, or have you found a good resource for uploading your own docs/epubs and having them read back by one of these higher quality synthesized voices? (I've been looking for the latter, but not having much luck.)
You can't use audio for serious books or articles but History, Biographies, Fiction, random tech articles bookmarked in Pocket and it's locally generated, so no latency is great.
Additionally, when you use a TTS engine, you can see the text and easily copy the things you want to make a note on later. With Audiobooks it's not possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being auto-generated is not the problem. I listen to a lot of text-to-speech voiced articles and epub books now. The problem is that filtering/searching on that massive catalog and weeding the useless stuff out.
Are you doing that with "old-fashioned" TTS, or have you found a good resource for uploading your own docs/epubs and having them read back by one of these higher quality synthesized voices? (I've been looking for the latter, but not having much luck.)
Great idea. I wonder how long until we'd see a lot of "autogenerated" podcasts with syndicated advertising inside spamming the podcast space. Like with robovoiced videos on YT reading some scraped content.
Would you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.
Depends on the what you are trying to get out of a podcast. Most of the podcasts I listen to are because I want to learn something new in an entertaining format. I'm not listening to develop parasocial relationships with the hosts, so removing that element could be a good thing for me. Of course if you listen to podcasts because you like the parasocial aspect or the celebrity interviews, then yeah... Not really a poi…