141–150 of 255 posts
Not directly related to the software, but interestingly on the authors website there is a Schedule a free call with me ( https://claudio.uk/templates/call.html ). I wonder if randos on the internet ever do that, and how it works out.
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> On the other, some of my favorite audio books all stood out because the narrator was interpreting the text really well This (and everything else with AI) isn't saying "you don't need good actors any more". It's saying "if you don't have an audiobook, you can make a mediocre one automatically". AI (text, images, videos, whatever) doesn't replace the top end, it replaces the entire bottom-to-middle end.
RIP to future top-enders that would normally have started out on the bottom to middle end.
The "top-enders" are the privileged who need to have some of their gains for their intelligence redistributed to others. The alternative is "survival of the smartest", which is de-facto what we have today and what Young was trying to warn us about.
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that's the thing. it's not just for accessibility. anything not already narrated is a fair target for TTS. i don't have time to sit down and read books. all reading is done on the go, while getting around or doing daily routines at home. i have a small book that i am reading now, which should take a few hours to finish, but in the time i manage to get done reading it i will probably have listened to two or three audi…
You don't choose to spend your time reading books. You probably roll your eyes when someone tells you they don't have time for some activity you deem valuable. This is the 'no time to exercise' debate in a different shape. They are also different activities, with audio it's easier to listen to more but retention is usually lower. Not casting any elitist "you need to read" bullshit by the way, but find it odd to defin…
There's a few categories where it makes sense to roll your eyes, like if they say they have no time to shower or have never been to one of their kid's baseball games.
But for things that aren't basic human expectations, I think you'd have to a real jerk to roll your eyes at someone not having time. No time to cook multi-pot dishes? No time to exercise? No time to read? No time to go to museums? No time to meet at the bar for a drink? Any of them sensible.
No one can do everything, we all make our priorities and its well within their choice not to have any one optional life thing at the top of their personal stack.
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If you see podcasts as useless in modern society as illuminated manuscripts, no big loss I suppose, but I do enjoy the human made ones and would be sad to see them go extinct as the manuscripts did. And the same thing is happening to other entry-level creative roles, some of which you may personally regret the loss of too.
I enjoy looking at illuminated manuscripts. Podcasts are bullshit and can die in a ditch.
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I was just thinking about automatically slapping an mp3 on every blog post, just an accessibility nicety. Can someone with low vision tell me if this would be useful to them? It may be that specialist tools already do this better.
People use screen readers for accessibility. I would not expect anyone to be able to "look for and find" your mp3... I would instead expect them to use the tool they normally use for accessibility. The real question is "what tools are they already using and how can I make sure those tools are providing higher quality output?". There are standards in browsers for these kinds of things (ways to hint navigation via acce…
Yes, that was my second thought. But I'd rather ask someone than rely on my assumptions.
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You can do it easily with non-DRM books (or DRM stripped books): For Android: - Moon+ reader pro - some paid high-quality TTS voices (like Acapella) For iOS: - Kybook reader and internal iOS voices (no external TTS voices for the walled garden) This works well enough to listen to a book while you walk and when you get back home read on the WC from the place you stopped. Additionally if you buy a tablet or an android…
But you need an android phone, and can't use a kobo or similar wink reader?
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> On the other, some of my favorite audio books all stood out because the narrator was interpreting the text really well This (and everything else with AI) isn't saying "you don't need good actors any more". It's saying "if you don't have an audiobook, you can make a mediocre one automatically". AI (text, images, videos, whatever) doesn't replace the top end, it replaces the entire bottom-to-middle end.
RIP to future top-enders that would normally have started out on the bottom to middle end.
For anyone looking for an easier alternative (and one without the bugs the author describes, such as skipping some prefaces or failing to detect some chapters), Voice Dream Reader on iOS (and macOS) handles .epub and other e-books just fine and supports a variety of built-in and external voices.
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Cars also have legs while audio doesn't, a point which is equally irrelevant. If people don't need to read, they don't need to read, and no matter how much a random Internet commenter wants them to need it, it won't change anything. Skills atrophy for a reason. It's fine to let them. You may as well be lamenting the lost art of long division.
> Cars also have legs while audio doesn't, a point which is equally irrelevant. That's what a LLM would say :)
If you look for a lot of the great classics, audiobooks results are inundated with basic TTS "audiobooks" that are impossible to filter out. These are impossible to listen to because they lack the proper intonation marking the end of sentences, making it very tiring to parse. It might be better than tuna can sounding recordings, especially if you want to ear them in traffic (a common requirement), but that's about it…
Yeah, that's a known issue, if the book is all on a single chapter you don't get any sense of progress. I may fix that next weekend
It did finish and result is basically as good as the provided example, so I'd say quite good! I'll plan to process some book before going to bed next time!
Chapter 1 read in 6033.30 seconds (33 characters per second)