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ElevenReader

elevenreader.io

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Re: ElevenReader

#11

Post by rapind »

VierScar wrote: post #9
bjackman wrote: post #7

Really glad these products are appearing! So much of my time for "reading" is in a context where I can't physically read, so audiobooks are incredibly useful. But being limited to the set of books that gets recorded by the publisher is a real shame. Haven't tried it yet but AI TTV seems basically perfect now so I'm very optimistic this will work great.

I'm interested for this reason too, even listened to AI TTS books before, but the issue is that they are very monotonous. The tone almost never changes, nor the pacing, it's all delivered with almost no variation which makes listening dull and easy to lose focus

I recommend John Doe if using eleven labs. Maybe too much variation, but I like it.

Re: ElevenReader

#13

Post by echelon »

emptysongglass wrote: post #3

I would never trust the company that acquired Omnivore only to sunset it with 2 weeks notice to retrieve data. Companies won't stop pulling this garbage unless we stop supporting them.

You can fight back by supporting and advocating for open source foundation text to speech models. XTTS, GptSoVits, Tortoise, Zonos, etc.

Open source models drive proprietary foundation models' margin to zero.

The only reason elevenlabs became a unicorn was their margin. If they became a commodity, they'd find themselves in a deep pit.

Re: ElevenReader

#15

Post by rapind »

csantini wrote: post #12

You can get pretty close with open source software: https://claudio.uk/posts/audiblez-v4.html

Oh wow. Thanks for posting! Samples sound great (on par with eleven by my untrained ear). Will definitely use this.

Re: ElevenReader

#16

Post by BoorishBears »

barrell wrote: post #6

Been using eleven labs for several years now. I was really impressed with their multilingual model a few years ago. Since then, they’ve released a few cheaper models, but the quality suffers greatly (they still have the old models though so it’s not an issue). They’ve also been releasing a ton of different products around TTS. I don’t mean this as a criticism — I just am curious why SOTA TTS has not improved from one…

The biggest challenge with TTS is high quality voice data. The architectures of closed providers still mostly trace their roots to stuff like Tortoise with a few exceptions.

Which is why it's especially ridiculous ElevenLabs allows professionals to upload their voices, charges users of those voices a minimum of $50 per million characters, likely pays under $1 for the compute... and then passes on a whopping $2 back to the professional.

I think the next disruptive TTS competitor is going to form out of just offering to pay better rates than ElevenLabs to their PVC users.

Finetuning established architectures on cleaner synthetic data is already getting open source models increasingly competitive, so getting top PVC samples from the source would likely put you right about where they are today.

Re: ElevenReader

#17

Post by jampekka »

__rito__ wrote: post #14

Is there a pricing page? I am not seeing any.

In the FAQ:

> Is the app free?

> Yes. The app is completely free to download and use today. Listening to content on the app will not consume credits from your monthly web plan. We do plan to eventually launch some premium version of the app, but even then we will maintain a generous free plan.

Re: ElevenReader

#18

Post by evrenesat »

milofeynman wrote: post #8

This raises an interesting question around the rights of the author/publisher and who they sold their ebook rights to. If in 3 years we have a perfect AI voice that can read any book as good or better than mid-level narrators, why would you ever buy an audiobook when you could just buy the ebook and pick your voice(s). What a time to be alive

The rise of streaming has made CDs and other offline media obsolete and publishing rights for them largely irrelevant. Audiobooks are likely to face a similar demise. One by one, all the frictions, I mean the colours of life, are fading away, sacrificed for the sake of convenience.

Edit: I think the effect of the invention of vinyl on live performers is more akin to how the commoditisation of HQ TTS will be detrimental to audiobook narrators.

Re: ElevenReader

#19

Post by neom »

csantini wrote: post #12

You can get pretty close with open source software: https://claudio.uk/posts/audiblez-v4.html

How does it hold up on long stuff? I use Elevenlabs Studio daily and once things start to get into the chapters long, the voice can really start to go off the rails. It'd say they've solved a lot of this over the past 2/3 months, but it does still happen on long stuff.
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