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ElevenReader

elevenreader.io

31–40 of 183 posts

Re: ElevenReader

#31
post #23

The video shows scenarios of people listening to pdfs of pretty dense material (e.g., computer science, bio mechanics). Does anyone here actually have positive results doing this? It seems to me listening to anything that's even remotely complex with the intent of learning it just isn't something that's feasible.

I used to have papers read to me via TTS when I had a long commute. This was before the current crop of neural TTS, mind you, so the quality and naturalness wasn’t as good, but it was good enough to tolerate and to get the gist of a paper. It failed terribly on equations, of course, but that’s often not too important on the first reading.

Re: ElevenReader

#32

This is definitely the future, I'm worried about the electric slip and slide world we're heading into though, where everything is completely spoonfed and consumptive. I can't help but think we're heading back into animalism.

> heading back into animalism

Could you expand upon this? Any milestones towards that which we should be mindful of?

Re: ElevenReader

#35
Last time I tried Elevenlabs for German text, it got a lot of numbers and dates wrong.

E. g. saying "1963" when the actual year in the text was 1967. Yeah, the voices sound very realistic. But I'm not sure how useful that is if you can't trust the spoken words.

Does anyone know if it got better in the last weeks?

Re: ElevenReader

#36
post #19

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.

>> the voice can really start to go off the rails. Do you mean the AI gets tired?

Re: ElevenReader

#37
post #23

The video shows scenarios of people listening to pdfs of pretty dense material (e.g., computer science, bio mechanics). Does anyone here actually have positive results doing this? It seems to me listening to anything that's even remotely complex with the intent of learning it just isn't something that's feasible.

[dead]

Re: ElevenReader

#38

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.

OMG I didn't realize that had happened. That sucks. Omnivore was great. But now I'm really glad I didn't make it part of my processes.

Re: ElevenReader

#39
post #13

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.

Sounds good. Do any of these have iOS or Android apps?

Re: ElevenReader

#40
post #23

The video shows scenarios of people listening to pdfs of pretty dense material (e.g., computer science, bio mechanics). Does anyone here actually have positive results doing this? It seems to me listening to anything that's even remotely complex with the intent of learning it just isn't something that's feasible.

It depends a lot on the paper. I've been using a TTS app to read papers for years. Papers that are really equation dense, convey they key ideas in figures or get too detailed aren't listenable. But sometimes review articles or papers with one clear message hit that sweet spot and are very listenable. There's one topic where everything I know about it I learned by listening to a review article on a long run. It was actually quite pleasant!
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