3 ms·

So what about having a text-to-speech program read a book? Doesn't that satisfy both?

by jolmg 6y ago

gxqoz 6y ago
I'm probably in the 99th percentile of listening to articles via text to speech but the book experience (especially fiction) is not nearly as good in this form. One difficulty is you're at the mercy of the text quality--visual artifacts and things like that which are easily ignored in visual form become a lot more annoying when listening to them. If you have a clean source, great, but most books you'd want to read aren't in this format.
the_af 6y ago
Do you prefer someone read you a book or reading it yourself? As a related issue: I just don't understand the audiobook phenomenon. I'm clearly the outsider here. I enjoy reading words, not having them read to me.
- gxqoz 6y ago
  I enjoy both but have probably 5x the time for listening compared to reading.
- jolmg 6y ago
  Well, normally I read them myself, but I was replying to: > Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things which certainly makes sense. While I haven't done so, I could listen to a book while driving, cooking, housecleaning, etc. Reading a book requires me to do nothing else in the mean time.
catalogia 6y ago
> Doesn't [text-to-speech] satisfy both? It does, and I've 'read' 10s of millions of words like this in the past year. I read long-form articles, nonfiction books, and fiction books like this. (The one thing I don't read like this is formatting-intensive PDFs, such as many text books, and that mainly comes down to limitations of my current setup.) For content on the web I use either firefox's reader mode, which has TTS, or emacs' eww browser with the read-aloud script. For ebooks, I use nov.el and read-aloud. Either allows me to seamlessly switch between visual reading and listening to TTS. This make binge reading easy since I can avoid eye fatigue. Incidentally, I think a lot of people dismiss TTS after trying it briefly because they underestimate neuroplasticity. Normally sighted people can become very proficient at listening to TTS at high speeds, but for some reason I've seen a lot of people assume only blind people can become accustomed to it. Once you become accustomed to it, the 'robotic' nature of the voice evaporates and it becomes as easy and intuitive as riding a bike.

So what about having a text-to-speech program read a book? Doesn't that satisfy both?

by jolmg 6y ago

So what about having a text-to-speech program read a book? Doesn't that satisfy both?

I'm probably in the 99th percentile of listening to articles via text to speech but the book experience (especially fiction) is not nearly as good in this form. One difficulty is you're at the mercy of the text quality--visual artifacts and things like that which are easily ignored in visual form become a lot more annoying when listening to them. If you have a clean source, great, but most books you'd want to read aren't in this format.

the_af 6y ago

Do you prefer someone read you a book or reading it yourself? As a related issue: I just don't understand the audiobook phenomenon. I'm clearly the outsider here. I enjoy reading words, not having them read to me.

gxqoz 6y ago
I enjoy both but have probably 5x the time for listening compared to reading.
jolmg 6y ago
Well, normally I read them myself, but I was replying to: > Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things which certainly makes sense. While I haven't done so, I could listen to a book while driving, cooking, housecleaning, etc. Reading a book requires me to do nothing else in the mean time.

catalogia 6y ago

> Doesn't [text-to-speech] satisfy both? It does, and I've 'read' 10s of millions of words like this in the past year. I read long-form articles, nonfiction books, and fiction books like this. (The one thing I don't read like this is formatting-intensive PDFs, such as many text books, and that mainly comes down to limitations of my current setup.) For content on the web I use either firefox's reader mode, which has TTS, or emacs' eww browser with the read-aloud script. For ebooks, I use nov.el and read-aloud. Either allows me to seamlessly switch between visual reading and listening to TTS. This make binge reading easy since I can avoid eye fatigue. Incidentally, I think a lot of people dismiss TTS after trying it briefly because they underestimate neuroplasticity. Normally sighted people can become very proficient at listening to TTS at high speeds, but for some reason I've seen a lot of people assume only blind people can become accustomed to it. Once you become accustomed to it, the 'robotic' nature of the voice evaporates and it becomes as easy and intuitive as riding a bike.