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Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

illuminate.google.com

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Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#61

Post by freefaler »

staticman2 wrote: post #56
smeej wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Elevenlabs reader does AI voices for free, not sure if they'll start charging at any point since I don't know how this fits into their business model.

It'll be great when the AI generation gets on device and you won't need to pay per minute of text generated. Elevenlabs would burn through the investors' money someday and they'd stop subsidizing the reader voice generation.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#62

Post by throwthrowuknow »

colesantiago wrote: post #9

So podcasts are now automated, anything with a speaker or a screen is now assumed to be not human. Is this supposed to be a good thing that we want to accelerate (e/acc) towards?

Man, it’s going to blow your mind when you realize that all the talking heads aren’t real and never were.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#63

Post by throwthrowuknow »

ansk wrote: post #25

Imagine reading a math or programming textbook where each statement was true with probability 0.95.

errata. Also real humans often make mistakes in live interviews. The biggest difference is that eventually these fake humans will have lower error rates than real ones.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#64

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #8
freefaler wrote: post #3

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.

I don't like podcasts that are conversations

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#65

Post by wintermutestwin »

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #58

Occasionally there's a podcast or video I'd like to listen to, but one of the voices is either difficult to understand, or in some way awful to listen to, or maybe the sound quality is really bad. It would be nice to have a an option for an automatically redubbed audio.

I sure do wish podcasters would learn about compression. I am constantly getting my ears blown out in the car from a podcast with multiple speakers who are at different volumes.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#66

Post by throwthrowuknow »

lelandfe wrote: post #35
Legend2440 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn’t have been trusting podcasts in the first place, Joe Rogan says plenty of false things no AI required.

Sure, but now now I – an idiot – can publish a podcast on... "Bayesian Multilevel Models," and fool almost everyone into thinking I know anything about it. I've seen YouTubers provide tutorials on auto-creating YouTube videos and podcast episodes on niche scientific subjects, on how to build seemingly-reputable brands with zero ongoing effort. That is all totally novel. Being able to lie or be wrong before is orthogo…

All the more reason to empower people to review, rate, comment on, block, downvote, and otherwise signal when something is incorrect.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#67

Post by phemartin »

culi wrote: post #39
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #8

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.

Maybe not a podcast, but I've often wished I could listen to a paper or an article while on a long drive

You may enjoy the product I've been working on...[0] it lets you listen to articles and subscribe to any website.

[0] https://playtext.app

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#68

Post by slashdave »

culi wrote: post #39
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #8

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.

Maybe not a podcast, but I've often wished I could listen to a paper or an article while on a long drive

Could be me, but the amount of attention I need to reserve in order to properly read and understand a technical paper makes this idea rather scary.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#69

Post by slashdave »

sno129 wrote: post #34
ansk wrote: post #25

Imagine reading a math or programming textbook where each statement was true with probability 0.95.

Plenty of mistakes in textbooks and research articles, it's possible the probability is already even lower.

That just means you are adding errors on top of existing ones, hardly an improvement

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#70

Post by wg0 »

fny wrote: post #2

Very clever use case. I'm presuming the set up here is as follows: - LLM-driven back and forth with the paper as context - Text-to-speech Pricing for high quality text to speech with Google's studio voices run at USD 160.00/1M count. And given the average 10 minute recording at the average 130 WPM is 1,300 words and at 5 characters per word is 6500, we can estimate an audio cost of $1. LLM cost is probably about the…

There's no guarantee that the discussion would be accurate. This stems from how the LLMs work.
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