As opposed to the other commenters, I like the voice. I can listen at 2x speed and understand without trouble. It's way better than the voices that come with espeak(-ng), at least. This one doesn't sound robotic at all, in comparison.
Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
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Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#12This looks like it is made by the same people behind Huffduffer [0]? Which is an absolutely amazing service I've been using for years: Just throw any audio file against it, and it will add it to a personal podcast feed.
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#13PSA: 5 free articles then a paid service. You learn this once you’ve handed over your email address.
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#14PSA: 5 free articles then a paid service. You learn this once you’ve handed over your email address.
5 free articles per month or unlimited for $36/year.
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#15I’m excited to try this. I have some quite long reads which just sit there unread and are building up much quicker than I can find time to read them.
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#16This is a very interesting idea, but unfortunately I seriously couldn't listen to that robot voice for more than a couple minutes at a time. I read recently about big advances in AI speech production. I assume that is all still proprietary? (And note, the voice is not bad compared to what computer speech synthesis used to be. I went back and listened again and was quite surprised by some human-like intonations. But,…
So it seems to be using AWS Polly's "standard" Joanna voice. However, you can also use "neural" voices (basically enhanced with ML) which sound somewhat better. Here's Joanna in neural mode: http://no.gd/voice2.mp3 .. and here's a British female voice which sounds pretty good: http://no.gd/voice1.mp3
Neural voices are 4x the price of standard ones though! Standard is $4 per 1 million characters, neural is $16. https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#17PSA: 5 free articles then a paid service. You learn this once you’ve handed over your email address.
If it wasnt on the main page before, it is in bold in the bottom paragraph now
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#18This is a very interesting idea, but unfortunately I seriously couldn't listen to that robot voice for more than a couple minutes at a time. I read recently about big advances in AI speech production. I assume that is all still proprietary? (And note, the voice is not bad compared to what computer speech synthesis used to be. I went back and listened again and was quite surprised by some human-like intonations. But,…
So it seems to be using AWS Polly's "standard" Joanna voice. However, you can also use "neural" voices (basically enhanced with ML) which sound somewhat better. Here's Joanna in neural mode: http://no.gd/voice2.mp3 .. and here's a British female voice which sounds pretty good: http://no.gd/voice1.mp3 Neural voices are 4x the price of standard ones though! Standard is $4 per 1 million characters, neural is $16. https:…
I really wish I could use the Neural voices on this, but at $4 per million characters, I'm just beyond breaking even. Since this is a self-funded side project, I can't run at a loss, and I don't think you can reasonably charge more for the kind of service ListenLater.fm provides, but I'm really excited about the prices coming down in this area.
For what it's worth, Google, Amazon, and basically everywhere else I've looked have the $4/million or $16/million for the higher quality voices.
I'm currently just using Joanna since I can get some cost savings by not having to run Text to Speech on the same article multiple times, so long as everyone gets the same voice. But I'm considering offering a limited selection of voices for non-american listeners soon.
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#19As opposed to the other commenters, I like the voice. I can listen at 2x speed and understand without trouble. It's way better than the voices that come with espeak(-ng), at least. This one doesn't sound robotic at all, in comparison.
I'm glad you feel that way. I added the speed options on the homepage in hopes that others would come to the same realization that the voice is pretty good if you're already listening to audio sped up. I definitely know listening to robotic voices isn't for everyone, and I'd love for the voices to get better, but for now it's working well enough for me to enjoy using it.
Re: Listenlater.fm – A Read-It-Later service for your ears
#20PSA: 5 free articles then a paid service. You learn this once you’ve handed over your email address.
I apologize. This was a huge oversight on my part. I could have sworn I'd put pricing information on the page. I've added them now.
Thanks for mentioning it. And as I have in my ToS and Privacy Policy, I will not be using your email for anything you haven't explicitly requested.