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ElevenReader

elevenreader.io

131–140 of 183 posts

Re: ElevenReader

#131
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting that they show people going on runs and driving cars in their demo videos. I’m pretty sure nobody developing that app has actually gone on a run or driven a car while using their app.

Wow really? I use it all the time for ~equivalent activities

How long are the articles you are reading? I’m reading blog articles rather than long form content. My queue is in the hundreds and the articles very in length from two minutes to 20 minutes. I found it really annoying to need to push buttons while driving to skip or auto play the next article.

Re: ElevenReader

#132

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.

I want to say, a lot of effort has been made recently to allow you to Self-Host Omnivore. I have done a lot to move it over so that all the features are self-hostable, including rewriting the entire PDF stack. I received a lot of support from the devs doing this too. I know the decisions of the Dev team were disappointing, but it's also worth pointing out that the site was kept up until around last month - despite th…

What's the contribution model moving forward? I see the repository is still active, but is it not still under the Eleven's control? How will it evolve when they stop accepting pull requests?

Re: ElevenReader

#133

I wish there was a reader app that was serious about text speech. This is not it, unfortunately. Reader apps need to focus on a text to speech experience that is identical to a music player so that you can use the app while in hands free situations. The app is also hard to use as a “read it later” tool on iOS. I was really hoping they would fix these issues by now because it was promising. This app truly does feel li…

Speechify is pretty good. You gotta pay to get the most out of it, but I use it enough to justify it. (Mostly for an egregiously long serial novel.) Sometimes there's jank, but the support and dev teams are super responsive.

Re: ElevenReader

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to say, a lot of effort has been made recently to allow you to Self-Host Omnivore. I have done a lot to move it over so that all the features are self-hostable, including rewriting the entire PDF stack. I received a lot of support from the devs doing this too. I know the decisions of the Dev team were disappointing, but it's also worth pointing out that the site was kept up until around last month - despite th…

What's the contribution model moving forward? I see the repository is still active, but is it not still under the Eleven's control? How will it evolve when they stop accepting pull requests?

It won’t be under Elevens control, part of the deal I believe. They’re allowed to remain opensource. Not folded into ElevenLabs.

As for contribution model, it’s still something I’m trying to figure out. For the moment, it was just trying to get a self host build ready and working.

But I have admin rights to the repo, and am not working for ElevenLabs, nor officially Omnivore. I was just a contributor before.

Re: ElevenReader

#135
I rely on ElevenReader several times a week for quick text to voice on snippets of text I’m working on or sometimes on full web pages when I hand it a url. It’s quick and easy to use and the performance and quality is high.

Re: ElevenReader

#137
Tried this app last week w/ an EPUB. It read all of the drop caps as individual letters, before moving on to the remaining portion of the word. It said “tilde” before each item in an unordered list. Too distracting to be of any practical use for me, unless there’s a setting I missed.

Re: ElevenReader

#138
I recognize and appreciate that this is free right now. But surely it won't always be. And I can't keep paying $10-20/mo for every individual AI tool.

Re: ElevenReader

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Why would you pay more than necessary to attract the voice talent you need? There aren’t (m)any businesses that pay multiples of market rates just to be nice.

There are plenty of businesses that assign integrity a non-zero value, because most businesses reflect people.

Maybe you're in a bubble devoid of that kind of thinking, so it seems very foreign or quaint.

Even then it's short-sighted thinking at best: the "market rate" is not some magic self-optimizing number.

Underpaying their creators is just creating the opportunity for someone to take the best of them on better terms.

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Elevenlabs is also able to raise trivially in this environment: you'd think while they're still floating out here without a moat other than high quality data, they'd overpay if anything and make narrators feel like royalty until they're replaced.

This isn't unlike Uber initially paying drivers massive bonuses and undercharging riders until they were able to leverage their massive network to increase prices past what the taxi providers they had decimated were charging. But in this case the marginal cost of providing the service is so low they don't even have to lose money to run a similar play, just take less of it. (in other words, even ruthless greed is not antithetical to paying these folks better)

Re: ElevenReader

#140

I know I'm growing old but this is the kind of tech application that I don't like. Arts should be the last thing to be 100% fully done by a program. Enhancing capabilities in artists? Hell yeah. Replacing completely voice actors? No, thanks.

Of all the criticisms leveled against GenAI, I'd say making the case against "TTS on-demand" would probably be the weakest.

Having natural sounding TTS enhances accessibility for blind users, enables language localizations, etc. It's 100% a win even though there will be (and already is) disruption in the VA community.

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