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Show HN: Audible for the web, Switch seamlessly between audio and text
http://bit.ly/2qeHLev http://bit.ly/2qeHLev
I’ve wanted to listen to my favorite articles or web novels and switch seamlessly between the audio and text so I can read, and if I want to cook or whatever else, I can continue off the audio. I could not find it anywhere, so I created one: http://bit.ly/2qeHLev http://bit.ly/2qeHLev. Click on the audio version, scrub the player and scroll the content to test it out. All of it is done programatically, so it works with anyone's voice. Also, it works on the mobile web so feel free to check it out on your phone.
What do you guys think about my side project? I'd love to hear your thoughts
- vitovito 9y agoI don't see any audio controls, or audio download progress, in either Safari, Chrome, or Firefox. Looks like a syntax error, there's some HTML in a Javascript file. Conceptually, since I can't try it, it reminds me a bit of hyperaudio. Have you seen http://hyperaud.io http://hyperaud.io? I also did a hypertranscript similar to this here: http://vitor.io/uxr101 http://vitor.io/uxr101 Click on any word to scrub to it, or click in whitespace to toggle play/pause.
- avantion 9y agowhoops, thank you for that input. Just fixed it.... I tried both of those links. It's pretty cool. It is very similar to what I've created except I took UI cues from Audible's mobile app. ...Man, just goes to show how big the world is. I thought I was a bit original on that. Thank you for sharing.
- avantion 9y agoHow did u manage the sync between the audio and words? ... In my little demo, I've used IBM Watson's Speech to text API to analyze the audio. I used those results - it had timestamps, to the recognized words - and used some algorithms to match it with the text. Naturally, it did not catch like 20% of the words but was able to massage it enough that it looked smooth.
- vitovito 9y agoI had a verbatim transcript already, and I used CMU Sphinx to do the alignment between that and the recording. With raw audio only, I'd probably use a transcription service that provides timings, or software like Trint to do machine learning first, and then clean up by hand, like you did. The software I wrote to handle the playback is here: https://github.com/vitorio/hyperaudio-lite https://github.com/vitorio/hyperaudio-lite
- visarga 9y agoI have a similar system implemented with TTS. It highlights text as it reads it. Do you depend on human generated audio files?
- avantion 9y agoI'd love to see it. Do you have a link? ... Yes, I depend on the human generated audio file over TTS. The synthesized voice is not so great though it's getting better every year. I wanted something similar to Audible's WisperSync (http://www.audible.com/mt/wfs http://www.audible.com/mt/wfs) which uses real voice narrators.
- visarga 9y agoIt's just a bookmarklet for Chrome on OSX, using the Alex voice from the operating system. I put inside it a ton of JS, to find text and read it back, while changing the color of words. You can trigger it with clicking on a word. The script would also restyle text so it is easier to read. https://gist.github.com/Visarga/e6597edcb7ec6993521829ef5c1798db https://gist.github.com/Visarga/e6597edcb7ec6993521829ef5c17... The code is uglified for bookmark use, but the original is not something I would be proud to share (it's almost a mess). By the way, I have special treatment for YC, reddit and arXiv. Only the posts are converted into speech, skipping other texts.
- optikals 9y agothat's The Thing 5+
- avantion 9y agoI'm not really sure what you mean by 'The Thing 5+'