Chirp (HD) gives you $30 per 1M characters for free on the free tier also
I'd have to analyze my usage. For me, having used it for over a year cost me a penny. If I can ensure my total cost is less than $1/month, I'll consider it if the quality is really good. The Google one is "good enough", but not great. One other feature I'd really like: Having the AI figure out who is saying what and use different voices (e.g. one voice for overall narrator, and separate voices for each person who is…
You start doing that for text from ebooks and Audible is going to want to have words with you.
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…
I don’t know- I used the app last night as an audiobook reader before going to bed and it had automatic chapter detection, a sleep timer and you could even click on a word and it would start reading from there. It’s pretty solid.
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.
Severe dyslexia here, but ask me about any conversation or audio book or class I've listened to. Gimme anything audio and gimme it at 1.5x plz! I spend so much money gen'ing audio these days but it's soooo nice to be able to learn so quickly now.
Oh that's totally fair, and I'm happy to hear that audio books have been such a huge help for you!
But just to clarify, do you listen to dense material on commutes or while on walks or are you listening and taking notes at a table or something?
That's my main point. As someone that doesn't have dyslexia, sitting at a table and taking notes while reading dense material is already quite difficult to do when I'm trying to actually learn the material. I couldn't imagine being effective in my learning by just listening while on an early morning commute or something like the promotional video shows.
Severe dyslexia here, but ask me about any conversation or audio book or class I've listened to. Gimme anything audio and gimme it at 1.5x plz! I spend so much money gen'ing audio these days but it's soooo nice to be able to learn so quickly now.
Oh that's totally fair, and I'm happy to hear that audio books have been such a huge help for you! But just to clarify, do you listen to dense material on commutes or while on walks or are you listening and taking notes at a table or something? That's my main point. As someone that doesn't have dyslexia, sitting at a table and taking notes while reading dense material is already quite difficult to do when I'm trying…
to your point, if it needs to sink in I'm sitting in silence in my thinking room looking at my white wall or eyes closed, listening, pausing, thinking, listening, rewinding. notes etc are pretty useless for me, this probably sounds insane to you, but my memory can't process written words that I'm aware of (reading is just me saying things back to myself in a inaudible whisper) - It's slightly uncomfortable, but can listen to multiple things at the same time and think about them separately (the news and an audio book), not as good at that was I was in my 20s and 30s, but still there. I find it impossible to imagine how people who can read and can take notes etc think, I have no clue, so I presume my thinking style might be hard for someone like that to grasp also?
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.
Yeah, mostly super long form stuff. If it's only 2 minutes it's faster for me to just read it than to open it in their reader Fwiw, I would use their app way more if it were better. Right now I use it for 1-2 long form articles at a time, I am sometimes willing to push buttons in order to stay focused but will bail out to eg my podcasts app if that becomes untenable
For me, it's less about the individual pieces length and more about the length of my total queue. An example might be reading the top 10 HN articles I saved for later while doing laundry or something like that. The current UI makes no accommodation for this use case, while other apps, like Pocket, do.
I'd have to analyze my usage. For me, having used it for over a year cost me a penny. If I can ensure my total cost is less than $1/month, I'll consider it if the quality is really good. The Google one is "good enough", but not great. One other feature I'd really like: Having the AI figure out who is saying what and use different voices (e.g. one voice for overall narrator, and separate voices for each person who is…
You start doing that for text from ebooks and Audible is going to want to have words with you.
I do it only for long articles. Not interested in converting fiction into audio books unless the quality rivals that of real storytellers.
And, you know, this is not a service I'd provide others. Just for my own use running from my PC. Audible won't know or care, just as no one cares if you borrow a book from the library and photocopy it for your own use.
Downloaded the app and inserted 3 publicly visible URLs. Only last one was to be downloaded and listened. Not sure whether it's their UserAgent string or what
I have used Moon+ Reader [1] for years with the build-in Android TTS service. It works very well, is free, and sounds good enough for me. 1: https://moondownload.com/
ReadEra is pretty good, too. I used it to listen to books 2 & 3 of The Three Body Problem series last year .
A friend of mine is an actor (cinema, tv, theater) who makes a significant amount of his income as a voice actor.
For a long time I wanted to make a game - think The Stanley Parable or Thomas Was Alone - that would be narrated by the voice of either David Attenborough or Morgan Freeman. You know, it's a low hanging fruit, you can have a two hours long footage of zebras running around narrated by either of these and it's suddenly eerily fascinating.
So far I'm AI skeptic, but this voice thing really makes me think about an actual shift in how certain jobs can become irrelevant in foreseeable future.