6 ms·

Free Text-to-Speech App with natural voices

38 points by jslakro 2y ago

zuhsetaqi 2y ago
Account needed to use the app
- simfree 2y ago
  How does it compare to app.lmnt.com ? lmnt sounds quite good to me, near natural.
  - NayamAmarshe 2y ago
    That Ava voice is amazing!
radicalriddler 2y ago
I've used this, and the main ElevenLabs service. The reader has to be using a very very cheap model, it sounds worse than the Azure service (which isn't bad). It's better than traditional text to speech, but I can't use it to listen to long form articles.
- pogue 2y ago
  I don't believe Azure's TTS is free anymore.
  - radicalriddler 2y ago
    Ah it's definitely not (significantly cheaper than ElevenLabs), but I was expecting ElevenLabs to be better because I hadn't read (or seen anything suggesting) it was a worse model, but it makes sense.
roshankhan28 2y ago
the quality is somewhere 6/10. it still sounds robotics like alexa but its free so it works. i have heard the same audio on youtube videos aswell.
andrewstuart 2y ago
Eleven Labs is too expensive. They’re missing the chance to be cheap and sweep as many developers as possible into their net. OpenAIs genius is not only being first with a truly great product but being so cheap it’s the easy and obvious choice for developers. Something better will come along.
- tkgally 2y ago
  Eleven Labs announced a price reduction yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wevDlfDIG9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wevDlfDIG9s It still seems a bit expensive to me, though....
dakial1 2y ago
I haven't tested the app but the main service is pretty near natural language. If 11labs app get to the main service quality and start accepting ePubs, it will be the death of Audible.
- dmd 2y ago
  You must be listening to some reaaaaly bad readings.
  - dotinvoke 2y ago
    As a long-time Audible subscriber, I’d estimate that I skip 1 in 3 books because of the narrator’s voice or bad recording setup.
    - dmd 2y ago
      Ah - I have probably listened to maybe 8-10 audiobooks and all ones that have been recommended to me as excellent. I guess I just assumed that that’s what audiobooks are like, which I guess doesn’t make sense.
    - mylastattempt 2y ago
      My main reason of returning or not listening to audiobooks, be it with Audible or competitors, has been either a) a whiny or nasal voice, or, b) a strong accent that i dislike (e.g. strong British or Australian accent). I have found myself finding more new books by checking which other books a specific narrator has voiced, rather than finding a book I want to listen to and hoping for a good narrator. /rant i guess
- signaru 2y ago
  I believe Audible is already using non human speakers as well and just making up names for the narrators. I can tell since sometimes pronunciations are wrong and sound similar to TTS mistakes.
- _aavaa_ 2y ago
  Death is a bit extreme. I think acquisition is much more likely.
C-Loftus 2y ago
I personally love using Piper to make audiobooks offline. I made a CLI wrapper over it and it works great for me [0] Honestly surprised more people aren't using similar offline tools. I have listened to dozens of audiobooks in the past year through this. There is a pitfall in thinking that the most natural voice is the most important metric (i.e. many blind users still prefer espeak). Piper has a great balance of natural voice, offline convenience/privacy, and interpretability at high speeds. Still have not seen anything better as an overall audiobook solution. https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook
- westcort 2y ago
  I am excited to try it! Could you add a prebuilt release? Would it be possible to post a sample output so people can judge for themselves whether they would like the quality available?
  - C-Loftus 2y ago
    Yes I do have prebuilt rolling releases. Since they are categorized as draft releases, GitHub hides them by default, but they are there and should work fine: https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/ https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/ Examples of Piper generally can be found at https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ , and I added my program can be found at https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/tree/master/examples https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/tree/master/... I added this info in the readme for you and anyone else that could benefit from it.
    - westcort 2y ago
      I could not find anything at the on the releases page (https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/ https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/) This is what I see: https://imgur.com/screenshot-PqmyqhT https://imgur.com/screenshot-PqmyqhT Do I need a GitHub account to see the draft releases?
westcort 2y ago
I have found VoiceGen for Linux Mint to be very good (https://linux.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/VoiceGen-104295.shtml https://linux.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/VoiceGen-104295.sh...). It is available for download through the software manager. Also, this bookmarklet will speak highlighted text in the browser regardless of platform: javascript:void function(){ javascript:(function(){ var selection = window.getSelection().toString(); if (!selection) { alert("Please select some text on the page."); return; } var encodedSelection = document.createElement("div"); encodedSelection.textContent = selection; var processedContent = encodedSelection.innerHTML.replace(/\n/g, " "); var words = processedContent.split(" "); var formattedText = ""; var speechContent = ""; for (var i = 0; i < words.length; i++) { var word = words[i]; var chunkSize = Math.floor(word.length / 3) + 1; var boldPart = "" + word.substring(0, chunkSize) + ""; var lightPart = "" + word.substring(chunkSize, word.length) + ""; var formattedWord = boldPart + lightPart; if (word.endsWith(".")) { formattedWord += " *"; } formattedText += formattedWord + " "; speechContent += word + " "; } var newWindow = window.open("", "_blank"); newWindow.document.write("<html><head><title>Spoken Content</title></head><body><input type='range' min='0.1' max='10' value='1' step='0.1' id='rate-slider'>"%20+%20formattedText%20+%20"</body></html>");%20var%20rateSlider%20=%20newWindow.document.getElementById("rate-slider");%20var%20utterance%20=%20new%20SpeechSynthesisUtterance(speechContent);%20rateSlider.addEventListener("input",%20function()%20{%20utterance.rate%20=%20rateSlider.value;%20window.speechSynthesis.cancel();%20window.speechSynthesis.speak(utterance);%20});%20window.speechSynthesis.speak(utterance);%20})();}();
- pogue 2y ago
 I saved this to pastebin (mostly to see the syntax). Does this require Voicegen to be installed or how's it working? https://pastebin.com/zuRVpiVh https://pastebin.com/zuRVpiVh
 - ortsa 2y ago
 I believe it's using the web speech API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_... I've played with it a bit (I made a local nonsense social media thing, reading llm content), and its surprisingly easy to get text to display in sync with the audio. It works with voices that are installed on the users system.

38 points by jslakro 2y ago

zuhsetaqi 2y ago

Account needed to use the app

simfree 2y ago
How does it compare to app.lmnt.com ? lmnt sounds quite good to me, near natural.
- NayamAmarshe 2y ago
  That Ava voice is amazing!

radicalriddler 2y ago

I've used this, and the main ElevenLabs service. The reader has to be using a very very cheap model, it sounds worse than the Azure service (which isn't bad). It's better than traditional text to speech, but I can't use it to listen to long form articles.

pogue 2y ago
I don't believe Azure's TTS is free anymore.
- radicalriddler 2y ago
  Ah it's definitely not (significantly cheaper than ElevenLabs), but I was expecting ElevenLabs to be better because I hadn't read (or seen anything suggesting) it was a worse model, but it makes sense.

roshankhan28 2y ago

the quality is somewhere 6/10. it still sounds robotics like alexa but its free so it works. i have heard the same audio on youtube videos aswell.

andrewstuart 2y ago

Eleven Labs is too expensive. They’re missing the chance to be cheap and sweep as many developers as possible into their net. OpenAIs genius is not only being first with a truly great product but being so cheap it’s the easy and obvious choice for developers. Something better will come along.

tkgally 2y ago
Eleven Labs announced a price reduction yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wevDlfDIG9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wevDlfDIG9s It still seems a bit expensive to me, though....

dakial1 2y ago

I haven't tested the app but the main service is pretty near natural language. If 11labs app get to the main service quality and start accepting ePubs, it will be the death of Audible.

dmd 2y ago
You must be listening to some reaaaaly bad readings.
- dotinvoke 2y ago
  As a long-time Audible subscriber, I’d estimate that I skip 1 in 3 books because of the narrator’s voice or bad recording setup.
  - dmd 2y ago
    Ah - I have probably listened to maybe 8-10 audiobooks and all ones that have been recommended to me as excellent. I guess I just assumed that that’s what audiobooks are like, which I guess doesn’t make sense.
  - mylastattempt 2y ago
    My main reason of returning or not listening to audiobooks, be it with Audible or competitors, has been either a) a whiny or nasal voice, or, b) a strong accent that i dislike (e.g. strong British or Australian accent). I have found myself finding more new books by checking which other books a specific narrator has voiced, rather than finding a book I want to listen to and hoping for a good narrator. /rant i guess
signaru 2y ago
I believe Audible is already using non human speakers as well and just making up names for the narrators. I can tell since sometimes pronunciations are wrong and sound similar to TTS mistakes.
_aavaa_ 2y ago
Death is a bit extreme. I think acquisition is much more likely.

C-Loftus 2y ago

I personally love using Piper to make audiobooks offline. I made a CLI wrapper over it and it works great for me [0] Honestly surprised more people aren't using similar offline tools. I have listened to dozens of audiobooks in the past year through this. There is a pitfall in thinking that the most natural voice is the most important metric (i.e. many blind users still prefer espeak). Piper has a great balance of natural voice, offline convenience/privacy, and interpretability at high speeds. Still have not seen anything better as an overall audiobook solution. https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook

westcort 2y ago
I am excited to try it! Could you add a prebuilt release? Would it be possible to post a sample output so people can judge for themselves whether they would like the quality available?
- C-Loftus 2y ago
  Yes I do have prebuilt rolling releases. Since they are categorized as draft releases, GitHub hides them by default, but they are there and should work fine: https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/ https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/ Examples of Piper generally can be found at https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ , and I added my program can be found at https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/tree/master/examples https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/tree/master/... I added this info in the readme for you and anyone else that could benefit from it.
  - westcort 2y ago
    I could not find anything at the on the releases page (https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/ https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/) This is what I see: https://imgur.com/screenshot-PqmyqhT https://imgur.com/screenshot-PqmyqhT Do I need a GitHub account to see the draft releases?

westcort 2y ago

I have found VoiceGen for Linux Mint to be very good (https://linux.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/VoiceGen-104295.shtml https://linux.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/VoiceGen-104295.sh...). It is available for download through the software manager. Also, this bookmarklet will speak highlighted text in the browser regardless of platform: javascript:void function(){ javascript:(function(){ var selection = window.getSelection().toString(); if (!selection) { alert("Please select some text on the page."); return; } var encodedSelection = document.createElement("div"); encodedSelection.textContent = selection; var processedContent = encodedSelection.innerHTML.replace(/\n/g, " "); var words = processedContent.split(" "); var formattedText = ""; var speechContent = ""; for (var i = 0; i < words.length; i++) { var word = words[i]; var chunkSize = Math.floor(word.length / 3) + 1; var boldPart = "" + word.substring(0, chunkSize) + ""; var lightPart = "" + word.substring(chunkSize, word.length) + ""; var formattedWord = boldPart + lightPart; if (word.endsWith(".")) { formattedWord += " *"; } formattedText += formattedWord + " "; speechContent += word + " "; } var newWindow = window.open("", "_blank"); newWindow.document.write("<html><head><title>Spoken Content</title></head><body><input type='range' min='0.1' max='10' value='1' step='0.1' id='rate-slider'>"%20+%20formattedText%20+%20"</body></html>");%20var%20rateSlider%20=%20newWindow.document.getElementById("rate-slider");%20var%20utterance%20=%20new%20SpeechSynthesisUtterance(speechContent);%20rateSlider.addEventListener("input",%20function()%20{%20utterance.rate%20=%20rateSlider.value;%20window.speechSynthesis.cancel();%20window.speechSynthesis.speak(utterance);%20});%20window.speechSynthesis.speak(utterance);%20})();}();

pogue 2y ago
I saved this to pastebin (mostly to see the syntax). Does this require Voicegen to be installed or how's it working? https://pastebin.com/zuRVpiVh https://pastebin.com/zuRVpiVh
- ortsa 2y ago
  I believe it's using the web speech API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_... I've played with it a bit (I made a local nonsense social media thing, reading llm content), and its surprisingly easy to get text to display in sync with the audio. It works with voices that are installed on the users system.