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.
ElevenReader
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Re: ElevenReader
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, is there evidence it is unsafe?
I can listen to a song while coding. I can't listen to a podcast while coding. A podcast demands way more attention than a song. 1.2 million people die in road accidents, and most of them are children and young people. Even more are seriously injured.
If there were any substantial evidence of this, they would have shutdown the entire A.M. spectrum 50 years ago.
Re: ElevenReader
#143This 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
I don't know if you remember but some of the earlier Kindles had both speakers and TTS built in but were sadly pressured to remove the feature.
https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-spee...
Re: ElevenReader
#144I’ve actually used this extensively for months now since it’s free and works with PDFs I’ve downloaded off the internet. I was so frustrated with ridiculously overpriced TTS (must pay for annual sub! no monthly) when I found this gem.
My main use case is comp. sci and philosophy books. I download PDFs of varying quality off the internet onto my phone and import them into this app. The text translation is always solid but for the former, graphs and diagrams really break it. It’s a tricky problem because these often are important to the text so skipping them (for the app) isn’t ideal but the current solution just makes the reader goof up. I think it would be cool if the model could identify these objects and maybe generate some text describing the object and TTSing that. Minor gripe and for the latter, it’s perfect.
I’ve probably used this app for 70 reading hours at 1.5x speed across long road trips and walking my dog at the park. I’ve gotten through numerous books I wouldn’t have and for free. I’m happy!
(annoying bug I find often: it seems certain characters or tokens just break it and it freezes. I need to manually skip ahead hoping it doesn’t get stuck again. Really detracts from the hands free nature and is difficult to manage while driving)
Re: ElevenReader
#145Are there any good papers from which I can learn the recent development of TTS tech?
Re: ElevenReader
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand, It can do things that weren't previously possible, but it will also replace things that were done by humans, by artists before. Overall, in my opinion, is still a loss.
I think calling this art is a stretch, as they usually aren’t the author. By automating it, it lowers the barrier to access this type of audio content for the masses. If you want to choose to pay someone you read something for you, the market allows that. This feels like a net gain.
> I think calling this art is a stretch, as they usually aren’t the author.
I can't even remotely agree.
Narrating a book is absolutely an art. Listen to a book narrated by Stephen Fry, and all other books will sound awful. Considerable care and craft goes into a well-read book.
But this is why I'm actually excited about good TTS tools. Not because I want to displace Stephen Fry, but because there are so many books read by awful narrators and something like ElevenReader would be a huge step up in quality.
I share the parent commenter's concerns about the displacement of artists, but I'm less convinced that TTS tools are a net negative.
Re: ElevenReader
#147The voices are excellent, but the app needs work. It lost my place in a book a few times, so I switched back to VoiceDream (don't use VoiceDream, it stinks unless you're a legacy purchaser).
Re: ElevenReader
#148I immediately copy/pasted in some smut to check if it was going to lecture me on my moral failings and was pleasantly shocked to find a corporate AI model that did what I asked without pushing puritanical nonsense one me.
Re: ElevenReader
#149I 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 only heard of Eleven today. Downloaded and tried it and I was actually shocked by how well it works. It works perfectly with my headphones and I can skip forwards or backwards as I want. I can change the speed of the voice (tho, that does get a little buggy). I just put in a random Aeon article and was shocked how quickly it did everything. Even giving me an audio length
Re: ElevenReader
#150I've been enjoying this app except I could not find a way to export the content to an audio file. I want to send the content to others - I'd even take a link to a website with a Play button (just not one that forces an app download)