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Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

neurrone.com

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Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#61

Post by c6401 »

Neurrone wrote: post #33

Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon. Happy to answer any questions.

Really liked the article.

The interesting part for me was that you can recognize synthetic voice much faster than human speech. Is there a specific voice you are using for 800wpm or it can be any TTS? Also, I think older voices sound more robotic that the newer ones (I mean pre AI, like the default on android is newer for me). Is there a difference for how fast you can listen to the newer more nicely sounding ones or the older more robotic ones?

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#63

Post by Neurrone »

c6401 wrote: post #61
Neurrone wrote: post #33

Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon. Happy to answer any questions.

Really liked the article. The interesting part for me was that you can recognize synthetic voice much faster than human speech. Is there a specific voice you are using for 800wpm or it can be any TTS? Also, I think older voices sound more robotic that the newer ones (I mean pre AI, like the default on android is newer for me). Is there a difference for how fast you can listen to the newer more nicely sounding ones or…

> Is there a difference for how fast you can listen to the newer more nicely sounding ones or the older more robotic ones?

Yes. The main requirements for the TTS I use is it must be intelligible at very high rates of speed and it must have no perceivable latency (i.e, how long it takes to convert a string of text to audio). This rules out use of almost all voices, since a lot of them are focused on sounding as human as possible, which comes at the expense of being intelligible at high rates. The newer voices also usually don't have low latency.

> Is there a specific voice you are using for 800wpm or it can be any TTS?

I'm using ETI Eloquence. If I switched to another voice capable of being intelligible at ESpeak, I would have to slow down because I'm not used to it and have to train myself to get back to the speeds I'm used to.

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#64

Post by Neurrone »

xiande04 wrote: post #56
Neurrone wrote: post #33

Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon. Happy to answer any questions.

Thanks for the blog post! I was wondering what TTS voices you use? I've heard from other blind people that they tend to prefer the classic, robotic voices rather than modern ML-enhanced voices. Is that true in your experience, too?

Yup, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719112

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#65

Post by Neurrone »

noahjk wrote: post #57
xiande04 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the blog post! I was wondering what TTS voices you use? I've heard from other blind people that they tend to prefer the classic, robotic voices rather than modern ML-enhanced voices. Is that true in your experience, too?

That was my initial thought, too - "I bet they can use a nicer voice now!" Sounds like the robotic voice is more important than we give it credit for, though - from the article's "Do You Really Understand What It’s Saying?" section: > Unlike human speech, a screen reader’s synthetic voice reads a word in the same way every time. This makes it possible to get used to how it speaks. With years of practice, comprehensio…

> When I listened to the voice sample in that section of the article, it sounds very choppy and almost like every phoneme isn't captured.

Every syllable is being captured, just speed up so that the pauses between them are much smaller than usual.

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#66

Post by spyrja »

For anyone wanting to trying this out on YouTube, select your video, open the Web Developer Tools with Ctrl+Shift+I, then type this (followed by a carriage-return):

  document.getElementsByClassName("video-stream html5-main-video")[0].playbackRate = 5; // Or whatever speed you choose

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#67

Post by Neurrone »

c6401 wrote: post #61
Neurrone wrote: post #33

Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon. Happy to answer any questions.

Really liked the article. The interesting part for me was that you can recognize synthetic voice much faster than human speech. Is there a specific voice you are using for 800wpm or it can be any TTS? Also, I think older voices sound more robotic that the newer ones (I mean pre AI, like the default on android is newer for me). Is there a difference for how fast you can listen to the newer more nicely sounding ones or…

I've added a section about TTS voices to the post, see https://neurrone.com/posts/software-development-at-800-wpm/#...

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#68

Post by Neurrone »

xiande04 wrote: post #56
Neurrone wrote: post #33

Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon. Happy to answer any questions.

Thanks for the blog post! I was wondering what TTS voices you use? I've heard from other blind people that they tend to prefer the classic, robotic voices rather than modern ML-enhanced voices. Is that true in your experience, too?

I've added a section about TTS voices to the post, see https://neurrone.com/posts/software-development-at-800-wpm/#...

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#69

Post by Neurrone »

dcre wrote: post #42
Neurrone wrote: post #33

Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon. Happy to answer any questions.

Great article. I was of course surprised to learn that it's possible to learn to understand the super-fast TTS, since videos and podcasts start to get very tough to follow around 2.5x and higher. I've been wondering: surely better algorithms for generating high-speed speech are possible, especially as we have more and more compute around to throw at it. It's not easy to search for, since "speed" for most tools is abo…

I've added a section about TTS voices to the post, see https://neurrone.com/posts/software-development-at-800-wpm/#...

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#70

Post by Neurrone »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #55
mbb70 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His comments on VS Code reminds me of the quote "Good accessibility design is mostly just good design": > Consistent keyboard shortcuts across all features, and the ability to jump to any part of the interface by keyboard This is something I notice and appreciate about VS Code as a fully sighted person. Just like I appreciate slopped sidewalk cutouts when I'm walking with luggage. A11y is a big commitment and cost, a…

I've been working on polishing accessibility features for a hobby web app, mostly out of curiosity to see what a deep dive would look like. Some of it is definitely UX polish, like if a button can be pressed to toggle a sidebar, then ESC should dismiss the sidebar and return focus to the button that toggled it. And when the sidebar opens, focus should be moved to the top of the sidebar. Though you can also get trappe…

> Though you can also get trapped in a fractal of polish-chasing

I think this applies to anything :)

> You quickly realize the behavior you see is an idiosyncrasy in the screen reader itself.

Yeah this is definitely a pain point during development. There is standardization and efforts to reduce these differences though, so I hope this gets better over time.

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