3 ms·
We're already there. I use Readwise Reader and often take advantage of the text-to-speech feature for listening to articles from the Economist. The Economist al
by sxg 3y ago
We're already there. I use Readwise Reader and often take advantage of the text-to-speech feature for listening to articles from the Economist. The Economist already provides an audio narration of the article by a human, but some of the narrators' British accents are a bit too thick and difficult for me to understand at 1.5x. Readwise Reader's text-to-speech does a much better job at 1.5x for my American English brain. AI-narration isn't perfect—here are some issues I have encountered:
- Section headers are read just like regular body text, which is confusing
- Not great with reading numbers. Narrating a year is very different from narrating a monetary value.
- Parenthetical statements are read just like regular body text
- mmahemoff 3y agoI also use Readwise Reader and the speech update they dropped a month ago made great strides towards AI reading. It’s just missing some UX improvements now, mainly the ability to continue playing across multiple articles. It’s also not smart enough to skip boilerplate junk that appears on top and bottom of every newsletter, which is easy to skip over visually but a pain when read out loud. A while ago, Amazon tried adding TTS to kindle and got immediately slammed by the publishers, so they withdrew it. However, with the current state of AI, I think users will start to demand it as a standard feature of anything they’re reading. Not only can it read at human-like capability, it can do so in any voice theoretically. Soon you’ll also be able to pause it and ask questions about what it just read or to summarize the rest of the article and so on.
- elektor 3y agoI just tried out Readwise Reader's speech feature and it looks like they use Unreal Speech[1]. The "Liv" voice sounded pretty realistic. 1: https://unrealspeech.com/pricing https://unrealspeech.com/pricing