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Were the onboard text recognition and speech synthesis APIs not good enough for this task?
by ummonk 3y ago
Were the onboard text recognition and speech synthesis APIs not good enough for this task?
- kolchinski 3y agoiOS has pretty decent built-in OCR and TTS but give it a try on a book page if you're curious — unfortunately the OCR makes a lot of mistakes (as well as including footnotes etc.) and the TTS is still pretty robotic. I do hope and expect they'll improve soon, though, at which point the only advantage of this app will be that it can scan multiple pages at a time — probably not enough of an advantage to justify its existence at that point although I'll see what users say. For now, as far as I've seen it's the highest-quality option for this (granted, very niche) paper-to-audio use case.
- lemming 3y agoThat’s interesting, my experience with the iOS OCR has been pretty good, but I haven’t used it for anything like this. What are you using instead?
- kolchinski 3y agoAlso Azure actually! Yeah for a sentence or two the onboard OCR usually gets it right, but if you’re listening to a few pages at a time there are almost always a bunch of errors and it gets pretty exasperating to listen to.