5 ms·

I'm the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I'm at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out at 1

I'm the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I'm at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out at 1219. 800 or so is the norm among programmers. In order to get it we normally end up using older synths which sound way less natural because modern synthesis techniques can't go that fast. There's a trade-off between natural sounding and 500+ words a minute, and the market now strongly prefers the former because hardware can now support i.e. concatenative synthesis. 1219 is a record as far as I know. We measured it explicitly by getting the screen reader to read a passage and dividing. I spent months working up from 800 to do it and lost the skill once I stopped (there was a marked level of decreased comprehension post 1000, but I was able to program there; still, in the end, not worth it). When I try to described the required mental state it comes out very much like I'm on drugs. Most of us who reach 800 or so stay there, though not always that fast for i.e. pleasure reading (I do novels at about 400). it's built up slowly over time, either more or less explicitly. I did it because I was in high school doing muds and got tired of not being able to keep up; it took about 6-8 months of committing to turn the synth faster once a week no matter what, keeping it there and dealing with a day or two of mild headaches. Note that for most blind people these days, total synthesis time per day is around 10+ hours; this stuff replaces the pencil, the novel, etc. Others just seem to naturally do it. You have little choice, it's effectively a 1 dimensional interface, so from time to time you find a reason to bump the knob. And that's enough. Whether and how much the skill transfers to normal human speech, or even between synths, is person-specific. I can't do Youtube at much beyond 2x. Others can. It's definitely a learned skill. 0: https://ahicks.io/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reordering/ https://ahicks.io/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reord...

CAMLORN 7y ago
And as a followup to that--because really this is the weird part--some circles of blind people (including mine) talk faster between ourselves. That's not common, but it happens. I still sometimes have to remember that other people can't digest technical content at the rate I say it and remember to slow down. A good way to bring it out is to have me try to explain a technical concept that I understand really well. I have the common problem in that situation of not being able to talk as fast as I think, but I also seem to have the ability to assemble words faster in a sort of tokenize/send to vocal cords sense once I know what I want to say. To me, the fact that this does in fact seem to be bidirectional at least some is more interesting than that I can listen fast.
- ahupp 7y ago
  That's awesome. It reminds me of the Bynars in Star Trek, who evolved ultra-fast spoken language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52_iSQnB6W0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52_iSQnB6W0
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  I kind of want to hear a "blind Danish" conversation now. For those unaware: Danish is phonetically one of the most difficult languages in the world, to the point where children who acquire Danish as their first language on average start speaking a few months later than children with any other first language. To clarify: speaking is not the same as understanding - toddlers are often capable of understanding language before they have the motor control required to speak it, which is why baby sign language exists.
  - tralarpa 7y ago
    Are you Danish? (your account name looks rather Dutch) I always wanted to know whether it's true what I heard some years ago: a friend told me that older Danish people are complaining that the younger Danish are harder to understand because there has been a trend in recent decades to swallow consonants even more than in the past (that's something hard to image for me as a non-Danish speaker :)
    - vanderZwan 7y ago
      No, I'm Dutch like you guessed. While the Netherlands and Denmark are very similar in some aspects (flat countries obsessed with having the best bike infrastructure in the world) the language is quite different ;) Living in Malmö I also find this quite hard to believe! Besides, isn't old people complaining about the younger generation butchering their language something that happens all the time in all cultures?
      - CRConrad 7y ago
        This is vague, because it was long ago, but I remember reading an article in a newspaper (Dagens Nyheter, Sweden, IIRC) in... Oh, the 1990s, I think. It was about how Danish linguists were worried about how the language was getting more unintelligible. The example I remember was about the ever-increasing number of words that are pronounced, basically, “lää'e”: läkare, läge, läger, lager... Those are written in Swedish here; some Dane may translate. (In English: healer, situation, camp [laager], layer...) There were more that I don't remember; in all, I think they mentioned at least half a dozen words that had become basically indistinguishable from each other. I don't think serious linguists have had the same fear about most other languages.
taneq 7y ago
Wow, that's incredible. Do you find it frustrating talking to actual humans now? I'd imagine it feels like they're speaking in slow motion. Edit: Hah, just saw your post on talking faster to other people who have the same audio skills.
- CAMLORN 7y ago
  Other people in realtime aren't...I guess the best way I have to put it is informationally sparse. There's a lot going on beside what's being said in conversation. Synths don't imply things for example; in a context with active implication slowing/pausing the synth is sometimes necessary. The skill doesn't extend beyond the blatant transfer of information. In social contexts and especially when you can't go off any visual cues whatsoever to figure out what the other person is thinking/feeling, there's a lot more going on than simple information transfer. However most blind people I know who do this start hating audiobooks, start hating talks, and generally by far prefer the text option. audiobooks aren't annoying, but they're below my baud if you will. Net result: boredom/falling asleep to whatever it is and the need to actively make an effort to listen. Some things which require active listener participation--math lectures for example--are different. I guess the best way I can put it is that speed is inversely proportional to the amount of, I guess let's call it active listening, required. I've given a lot of thought to this stuff, but we don't really have the right words for me to communicate it properly. A neuroscientist or linguist might, but I'm not either of those.
  - ColanR 7y ago
    > audiobooks aren't annoying, but they're below my baud if you will. Net result: boredom/falling asleep to whatever it is and the need to actively make an effort to listen. Some things which require active listener participation--math lectures for example--are different. That sounds like a similar description to what it's like for people with IQs significantly higher than the average.
  - dkarl 7y ago
    This is fascinating; thank you. How does an audio book read by the author, such as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, which contains autobiographical information, compare? Is it more like a social situation that you need real time to absorb, or do you prefer it at a higher speed? How does a stage play compare? Do you watch movies sped up? Also, how does your "baud" vary with your familiarity with the ideas? I can't imagine it's independent. As a ~35 year old programmer with a decade of professional experience and a decade of hobby experience before that, I cracked open SICP for the first time and found almost everything familiar. I had digested the ideas from other sources, so I could read at a "natural" rate. If I had read it as a teenager, it would have been a mindfuck, and I would have taken multiple slow readings to understand. When you talk about numbers like 800, are you talking about writing that challenges you and changes the way you think, or are you talking about stuff you do for a living that is just information you're already primed to accommodate?
josephpmay 7y ago
I can't find any recordings of 800 WPM synths. Would it be possible for you to make one? I'm curious of what it sounds like.
- shakna 7y ago
  I don't think it'd be legal for me to hand you an espeak recording, but it works fine at 800WPM. espeak -s 800 "Things to say."
  - CAMLORN 7y ago
    You can pass Espeak recordings around legally. It's just GPL. The license applies to the software, not the content produced via it. I will attempt to remember and find the time to take my demo recording of this on Rust compiler source code that's currently in dropbox and put it up somewhere more permanent. I doubt Dropbox will care for me much if I allow HN-volume traffic to hit my account. It's Espeak using an NVDA fork with an additional voice that some of us like, so vanilla espeak is in the ballpark. What I don't remember is if vanilla non-libsonic espeak softcaps the speech rate. It might. I believe new versions of espeak integrate libsonic directly, but that old versions just silently bump the speaking rate down if it's over the max. I haven't used command line espeak directly for anything in a very long time. Libsonic is an optimized library specifically for the use case of screen readers that need to push synths further: https://github.com/waywardgeek/sonic https://github.com/waywardgeek/sonic
  - warpech 7y ago
    Here's an online version, I bet it sounds similar as the original program: https://eeejay.github.io/espeak/emscripten/espeak.html https://eeejay.github.io/espeak/emscripten/espeak.html There is a range slider that maxes as 450, which is the maximum speed according to the manual. I tried listening to a Wikipedia article at 450, I am so amazed you can comprehend that. Perhaps that's equivalent of me visually scanning the text instead of reading, however when I do that, I tend to focus on interesting parts for long stretches of time. With espeak, how do you focus? Can you pause it at will?
tomp 7y ago
Has anyone tried overlapping words instead of speeding them up? Like so: How are you doing? I often wondered if this, or at least sped up speech, should be the default robotic interface... it would make sense to optimize for efficiency/speed (while maintaining legibility) if we can do so.
tripzilch 7y ago
Are old speech synths not harsh on the ears to listen for longer periods? Or maybe I'm just familiar with the super robotic ones (I like them for music production). If so, have you considered using an EQ plugin to maybe turn down the harsher high frequencies a few notches? Just a thought.
- CAMLORN 7y ago
  They're harsh. But you get used to it in about a week. Espeak is an atypically bad example, which is why NVDA experimented with a fork (and maybe one day the NVDA work will make it upstream). part of what allows them to stay intelligible is the harshness. I've never tried passing one through an EQ but there are already pitch settings and similar to play with, and given that even not wearing headphones slows me down I expect that an EQ would probably be bad for it. But more to the point there is nowhere to really plug that in to a screen reader, so we can't try it anyway. The audio subsystems of most screen readers are much less advanced than you'd think.
aepiepaey 7y ago
> Whether and how much the skill transfers to normal human speech, or even between synths, is person-specific. I can't do Youtube at much beyond 2x. Others can. It's definitely a learned skill. I find that the maximum understandable rate varies a lot between speakers. For some speakers 2.5x is possible, but just 1.5x for others. One advantage synths has, is that they can more easily control the speed at which words are spoken, and the pauses between words independently. When watching/listening pre-recorded content I often find that I'd want to speed up the pauses more than the words (because speeding up everything until the pauses are sufficiently short make the words intelligible). If someone knows of a program or algorithm that can play back audio/video using different rates for speech and silence, please share.

CAMLORN 7y ago

And as a followup to that--because really this is the weird part--some circles of blind people (including mine) talk faster between ourselves. That's not common, but it happens. I still sometimes have to remember that other people can't digest technical content at the rate I say it and remember to slow down. A good way to bring it out is to have me try to explain a technical concept that I understand really well. I have the common problem in that situation of not being able to talk as fast as I think, but I also seem to have the ability to assemble words faster in a sort of tokenize/send to vocal cords sense once I know what I want to say. To me, the fact that this does in fact seem to be bidirectional at least some is more interesting than that I can listen fast.

ahupp 7y ago
That's awesome. It reminds me of the Bynars in Star Trek, who evolved ultra-fast spoken language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52_iSQnB6W0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52_iSQnB6W0
vanderZwan 7y ago
I kind of want to hear a "blind Danish" conversation now. For those unaware: Danish is phonetically one of the most difficult languages in the world, to the point where children who acquire Danish as their first language on average start speaking a few months later than children with any other first language. To clarify: speaking is not the same as understanding - toddlers are often capable of understanding language before they have the motor control required to speak it, which is why baby sign language exists.
- tralarpa 7y ago
  Are you Danish? (your account name looks rather Dutch) I always wanted to know whether it's true what I heard some years ago: a friend told me that older Danish people are complaining that the younger Danish are harder to understand because there has been a trend in recent decades to swallow consonants even more than in the past (that's something hard to image for me as a non-Danish speaker :)
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    No, I'm Dutch like you guessed. While the Netherlands and Denmark are very similar in some aspects (flat countries obsessed with having the best bike infrastructure in the world) the language is quite different ;) Living in Malmö I also find this quite hard to believe! Besides, isn't old people complaining about the younger generation butchering their language something that happens all the time in all cultures?
    - CRConrad 7y ago
      This is vague, because it was long ago, but I remember reading an article in a newspaper (Dagens Nyheter, Sweden, IIRC) in... Oh, the 1990s, I think. It was about how Danish linguists were worried about how the language was getting more unintelligible. The example I remember was about the ever-increasing number of words that are pronounced, basically, “lää'e”: läkare, läge, läger, lager... Those are written in Swedish here; some Dane may translate. (In English: healer, situation, camp [laager], layer...) There were more that I don't remember; in all, I think they mentioned at least half a dozen words that had become basically indistinguishable from each other. I don't think serious linguists have had the same fear about most other languages.

taneq 7y ago

Wow, that's incredible. Do you find it frustrating talking to actual humans now? I'd imagine it feels like they're speaking in slow motion. Edit: Hah, just saw your post on talking faster to other people who have the same audio skills.

CAMLORN 7y ago
Other people in realtime aren't...I guess the best way I have to put it is informationally sparse. There's a lot going on beside what's being said in conversation. Synths don't imply things for example; in a context with active implication slowing/pausing the synth is sometimes necessary. The skill doesn't extend beyond the blatant transfer of information. In social contexts and especially when you can't go off any visual cues whatsoever to figure out what the other person is thinking/feeling, there's a lot more going on than simple information transfer. However most blind people I know who do this start hating audiobooks, start hating talks, and generally by far prefer the text option. audiobooks aren't annoying, but they're below my baud if you will. Net result: boredom/falling asleep to whatever it is and the need to actively make an effort to listen. Some things which require active listener participation--math lectures for example--are different. I guess the best way I can put it is that speed is inversely proportional to the amount of, I guess let's call it active listening, required. I've given a lot of thought to this stuff, but we don't really have the right words for me to communicate it properly. A neuroscientist or linguist might, but I'm not either of those.
- ColanR 7y ago
  > audiobooks aren't annoying, but they're below my baud if you will. Net result: boredom/falling asleep to whatever it is and the need to actively make an effort to listen. Some things which require active listener participation--math lectures for example--are different. That sounds like a similar description to what it's like for people with IQs significantly higher than the average.
- dkarl 7y ago
  This is fascinating; thank you. How does an audio book read by the author, such as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, which contains autobiographical information, compare? Is it more like a social situation that you need real time to absorb, or do you prefer it at a higher speed? How does a stage play compare? Do you watch movies sped up? Also, how does your "baud" vary with your familiarity with the ideas? I can't imagine it's independent. As a ~35 year old programmer with a decade of professional experience and a decade of hobby experience before that, I cracked open SICP for the first time and found almost everything familiar. I had digested the ideas from other sources, so I could read at a "natural" rate. If I had read it as a teenager, it would have been a mindfuck, and I would have taken multiple slow readings to understand. When you talk about numbers like 800, are you talking about writing that challenges you and changes the way you think, or are you talking about stuff you do for a living that is just information you're already primed to accommodate?

josephpmay 7y ago

I can't find any recordings of 800 WPM synths. Would it be possible for you to make one? I'm curious of what it sounds like.

shakna 7y ago
I don't think it'd be legal for me to hand you an espeak recording, but it works fine at 800WPM. espeak -s 800 "Things to say."
- CAMLORN 7y ago
  You can pass Espeak recordings around legally. It's just GPL. The license applies to the software, not the content produced via it. I will attempt to remember and find the time to take my demo recording of this on Rust compiler source code that's currently in dropbox and put it up somewhere more permanent. I doubt Dropbox will care for me much if I allow HN-volume traffic to hit my account. It's Espeak using an NVDA fork with an additional voice that some of us like, so vanilla espeak is in the ballpark. What I don't remember is if vanilla non-libsonic espeak softcaps the speech rate. It might. I believe new versions of espeak integrate libsonic directly, but that old versions just silently bump the speaking rate down if it's over the max. I haven't used command line espeak directly for anything in a very long time. Libsonic is an optimized library specifically for the use case of screen readers that need to push synths further: https://github.com/waywardgeek/sonic https://github.com/waywardgeek/sonic
- warpech 7y ago
  Here's an online version, I bet it sounds similar as the original program: https://eeejay.github.io/espeak/emscripten/espeak.html https://eeejay.github.io/espeak/emscripten/espeak.html There is a range slider that maxes as 450, which is the maximum speed according to the manual. I tried listening to a Wikipedia article at 450, I am so amazed you can comprehend that. Perhaps that's equivalent of me visually scanning the text instead of reading, however when I do that, I tend to focus on interesting parts for long stretches of time. With espeak, how do you focus? Can you pause it at will?

tomp 7y ago

Has anyone tried overlapping words instead of speeding them up? Like so: How are you doing? I often wondered if this, or at least sped up speech, should be the default robotic interface... it would make sense to optimize for efficiency/speed (while maintaining legibility) if we can do so.

tripzilch 7y ago

Are old speech synths not harsh on the ears to listen for longer periods? Or maybe I'm just familiar with the super robotic ones (I like them for music production). If so, have you considered using an EQ plugin to maybe turn down the harsher high frequencies a few notches? Just a thought.

CAMLORN 7y ago
They're harsh. But you get used to it in about a week. Espeak is an atypically bad example, which is why NVDA experimented with a fork (and maybe one day the NVDA work will make it upstream). part of what allows them to stay intelligible is the harshness. I've never tried passing one through an EQ but there are already pitch settings and similar to play with, and given that even not wearing headphones slows me down I expect that an EQ would probably be bad for it. But more to the point there is nowhere to really plug that in to a screen reader, so we can't try it anyway. The audio subsystems of most screen readers are much less advanced than you'd think.

aepiepaey 7y ago

> Whether and how much the skill transfers to normal human speech, or even between synths, is person-specific. I can't do Youtube at much beyond 2x. Others can. It's definitely a learned skill. I find that the maximum understandable rate varies a lot between speakers. For some speakers 2.5x is possible, but just 1.5x for others. One advantage synths has, is that they can more easily control the speed at which words are spoken, and the pauses between words independently. When watching/listening pre-recorded content I often find that I'd want to speed up the pauses more than the words (because speeding up everything until the pauses are sufficiently short make the words intelligible). If someone knows of a program or algorithm that can play back audio/video using different rates for speech and silence, please share.