81–90 of 183 posts
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.
if you are reading for information, I guess if this helps, sure go ahead.
when reading for pleasure, this is not it though.
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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.
1.2 million people die in road accidents, and most of them are children and young people. Even more are seriously injured.
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.
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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.
"replace things that were done by humans" isn't a loss by itself, if it frees up human labour to do other things. If human replaced by AI can't find better things to do, such that it makes them poorer, or anti-social its a loss but not necessarily AI's fault.
> can't find better things to do, such that it makes them poorer, or anti-social its a loss
I feel like this misses the point a bit - lost income/sustainability for artists is obviously a big issue we'll be facing, but looking for a performance indicator in an artistic endeavour doesn't really get you anywhere. There's more ways to value a painting than "what the market would pay" and "potential heat output as firewood", right?
I’ve been using this for a few weeks, it works great. Can’t wait until this is built natively into browsers or even the OS (ios voice is currently terrible)
The text to speech is alright, but it lacks almost any emotion, and it reads everything literally, which when the article/pdf has a weird layout, or has figures, doesn't sound natural. Though I expect they're just not using their top-of-the-line models for this - I've had much more luck pushing a pdf through Claude to generate the "verbal version" (which is mostly literal, but also describes the layout and figures) and then the result through the top-of-the-line ElevenLabs model.
Now, I've also checked out the podcast feature, and it's pretty clear they first do a textual generation, and then a simple text to speech. Again, lack of emotion, very mechanical flow.
I made a podcast of a technical article[0] in both ElevenLabs reader and Google's NotebookLM, and the NotebookLM podcast is a night-and-day improvement - maybe they use a better model, maybe they use straight "article to podcast" end-to-end multimodal generation, I don't know, but the quality, flow, emotion, is just on a completely different level. I had to quickly turn off the ElevenLabs-generated podcast cause I couldn't keep listening to it, while NotebookLM's one is legitimately enjoyable.
Now to finish on a more positive note, fingers crossed for the ElevenLabs team improving this, and us getting some competition in the area of article-to-audio, both podcast-style, and direct! I think, in general, it's a very promising product direction. Feature-wise, I would also love to get a daily overview podcast based on all my RSS feed articles for a given day.
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> heading back into animalism Could you expand upon this? Any milestones towards that which we should be mindful of?
Technology is pretty quickly and apparently not only coming for our critical thinking, but our agency With llms, "knowing things" is already starting to feel like a thing of a past, not to me, but to a lot of others, there's no longer an incentive to "switch on". Why should a kid learn anything if a robot is instantly better at everything? Maths got replaced by calculators, deep critical thinking will get replaced by…
Last time I tried Elevenlabs for German text, it got a lot of numbers and dates wrong. E. g. saying "1963" when the actual year in the text was 1967. Yeah, the voices sound very realistic. But I'm not sure how useful that is if you can't trust the spoken words. Does anyone know if it got better in the last weeks?