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ElevenReader
- reustle 2y agoI’ve been using this for a few weeks, it works great. Can’t wait until this is built natively into browsers or even the OS (ios voice is currently terrible)
- frontalier 2y agoios voice works better than read-aloud from chatgpt does. it sucks but doesn't fail after the first paragraph or so
- theothertimcook 2y agoThis is so impressive. No audiobook exists, drop epub into ElevenReader and have Bert Reynolds read it to you, honestly better than some human narrators.
- emptysongglass 2y agoI would never trust the company that acquired Omnivore only to sunset it with 2 weeks notice to retrieve data. Companies won't stop pulling this garbage unless we stop supporting them.
- echelon 2y agoYou can fight back by supporting and advocating for open source foundation text to speech models. XTTS, GptSoVits, Tortoise, Zonos, etc. Open source models drive proprietary foundation models' margin to zero. The only reason elevenlabs became a unicorn was their margin. If they became a commodity, they'd find themselves in a deep pit.
- qnleigh 2y agoSounds good. Do any of these have iOS or Android apps?
- james-bcn 2y agoOMG I didn't realize that had happened. That sucks. Omnivore was great. But now I'm really glad I didn't make it part of my processes.
- agnishom 2y agoThis is my main gripe with this company
- podgietaru 2y agoI want to say, a lot of effort has been made recently to allow you to Self-Host Omnivore. I have done a lot to move it over so that all the features are self-hostable, including rewriting the entire PDF stack. I received a lot of support from the devs doing this too. I know the decisions of the Dev team were disappointing, but it's also worth pointing out that the site was kept up until around last month - despite the warning stating that'd be down in November. Omnivore could have shut down their code base, and prevented self-hosting entirely. I'm glad they didn't.
- letmeinhere 2y agoWhat's the contribution model moving forward? I see the repository is still active, but is it not still under the Eleven's control? How will it evolve when they stop accepting pull requests?
- podgietaru 2y agoIt won’t be under Elevens control, part of the deal I believe. They’re allowed to remain opensource. Not folded into ElevenLabs. As for contribution model, it’s still something I’m trying to figure out. For the moment, it was just trying to get a self host build ready and working. But I have admin rights to the repo, and am not working for ElevenLabs, nor officially Omnivore. I was just a contributor before.
- letmeinhere 2y agoThat's good to know, thanks.
- zeroq 2y agowait till you find out about Scam Altam and his company x)
- nmca 2y agoI’ve listened to a few audiobooks on long drives, and have been surprised how hard it is to find good voices on audible. Often a book that might otherwise be good has a prohibitively annoying tone. So honestly the exciting thing here is the customisation. That said, even in their cherries the emphasis still isn’t quite right in the Tolkien example.
- unbecoming 2y agoAs a first impression, french sounding names should be read as french sounding, even in english text. The voice per se is ok, but as delivery goes (pausing, title vs content), it could be better.
- barrell 2y agoBeen using eleven labs for several years now. I was really impressed with their multilingual model a few years ago. Since then, they’ve released a few cheaper models, but the quality suffers greatly (they still have the old models though so it’s not an issue). They’ve also been releasing a ton of different products around TTS. I don’t mean this as a criticism — I just am curious why SOTA TTS has not improved from one model by one company several years ago, and why even said company isn’t able to improve on that model.
- BoorishBears 2y agoThe biggest challenge with TTS is high quality voice data. The architectures of closed providers still mostly trace their roots to stuff like Tortoise with a few exceptions. Which is why it's especially ridiculous ElevenLabs allows professionals to upload their voices, charges users of those voices a minimum of $50 per million characters, likely pays under $1 for the compute... and then passes on a whopping $2 back to the professional. I think the next disruptive TTS competitor is going to form out of just offering to pay better rates than ElevenLabs to their PVC users. Finetuning established architectures on cleaner synthetic data is already getting open source models increasingly competitive, so getting top PVC samples from the source would likely put you right about where they are today.
- brookst 2y agoWhy would you pay more than necessary to attract the voice talent you need? There aren’t (m)any businesses that pay multiples of market rates just to be nice.
- BoorishBears 2y agoThere are plenty of businesses that assign integrity a non-zero value, because most businesses reflect people. Maybe you're in a bubble devoid of that kind of thinking, so it seems very foreign or quaint. Even then it's short-sighted thinking at best: the "market rate" is not some magic self-optimizing number. Underpaying their creators is just creating the opportunity for someone to take the best of them on better terms. - Elevenlabs is also able to raise trivially in this environment: you'd think while they're still floating out here without a moat other than high quality data, they'd overpay if anything and make narrators feel like royalty until they're replaced. This isn't unlike Uber initially paying drivers massive bonuses and undercharging riders until they were able to leverage their massive network to increase prices past what the taxi providers they had decimated were charging. But in this case the marginal cost of providing the service is so low they don't even have to lose money to run a similar play, just take less of it. (in other words, even ruthless greed is not antithetical to paying these folks better)
- bjackman 2y agoReally glad these products are appearing! So much of my time for "reading" is in a context where I can't physically read, so audiobooks are incredibly useful. But being limited to the set of books that gets recorded by the publisher is a real shame. Haven't tried it yet but AI TTV seems basically perfect now so I'm very optimistic this will work great.
- VierScar 2y agoI'm interested for this reason too, even listened to AI TTS books before, but the issue is that they are very monotonous. The tone almost never changes, nor the pacing, it's all delivered with almost no variation which makes listening dull and easy to lose focus
- rapind 2y agoI recommend John Doe if using eleven labs. Maybe too much variation, but I like it.
- milofeynman 2y agoThis raises an interesting question around the rights of the author/publisher and who they sold their ebook rights to. If in 3 years we have a perfect AI voice that can read any book as good or better than mid-level narrators, why would you ever buy an audiobook when you could just buy the ebook and pick your voice(s). What a time to be alive
- evrenesat 2y agoThe rise of streaming has made CDs and other offline media obsolete and publishing rights for them largely irrelevant. Audiobooks are likely to face a similar demise. One by one, all the frictions, I mean the colours of life, are fading away, sacrificed for the sake of convenience. Edit: I think the effect of the invention of vinyl on live performers is more akin to how the commoditisation of HQ TTS will be detrimental to audiobook narrators.
- wiether 2y agoI guess it's the same with other jobs: AI will replace the mid/low quality workers, but the good ones will keep delivering something AI can't. Two audiobooks that come to my mind: - The Lord of the Ring series read by Andy Serkis; not only he perfectly switches between each characters voice, but also the feeling of listening "Gollum" for ours is something else altogether - David Goggins' books; the audiobook version is completely different than the book, since he's not just reading the book, and overall it makes the content easier to digest
- vunderba 2y agoI don't know if you remember but some of the earlier Kindles had both speakers and TTS built in but were sadly pressured to remove the feature. https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-speech-kindle https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-spee...
- jnsaff2 2y agoIt seems that this is using one of the less refined models. In English it sounds like a 4th grader reading in front of a class. Kinda stilted word by word voicing with static pauses between words and no variation in intonation. Tried with two voices and both are the same.
- csantini 2y agoYou can get pretty close with open source software: https://claudio.uk/posts/audiblez-v4.html https://claudio.uk/posts/audiblez-v4.html
- rapind 2y agoOh wow. Thanks for posting! Samples sound great (on par with eleven by my untrained ear). Will definitely use this.
- neom 2y agoHow does it hold up on long stuff? I use Elevenlabs Studio daily and once things start to get into the chapters long, the voice can really start to go off the rails. It'd say they've solved a lot of this over the past 2/3 months, but it does still happen on long stuff.
- masteruvpuppetz 2y ago>> the voice can really start to go off the rails. Do you mean the AI gets tired?
- zaptrem 2y agoIn autoregressive models error accumulates over time. He likely means the voice starts to make odd sounds/gets lower quality. It would be really interesting if OP could share a clip of this phenomenon!
- neom 2y agoVarious different things can happen, it would take me quite some time to dig up examples but at least with elevenlabs you don't get the clicks and pops you get like on notebook LM for example. 11labs instability comes in the forms of intonation, pitch, accent, garbled words or even once language. I've only seen it happen in the 3k+ words gen's I've done, usually actually around the 75% point of the narration of whatever I've converted, and on average lasting a couple of seconds top.
- __rito__ 2y agoIs there a pricing page? I am not seeing any.
- jampekka 2y agoIn the FAQ: > Is the app free? > Yes. The app is completely free to download and use today. Listening to content on the app will not consume credits from your monthly web plan. We do plan to eventually launch some premium version of the app, but even then we will maintain a generous free plan.
- mkmk3 2y agoDamn, tried a unicornriot article [1] and it just skipped several paragraphs past the grisly stuff. Can anyone else confirm? [1] - https://unicornriot.ninja/2024/sextortion-coms-inside-a-vile-child-exploitation-cult-run-by-nazi-linked-teens/ https://unicornriot.ninja/2024/sextortion-coms-inside-a-vile...
- ravetcofx 2y agoImportant article but horrific content. It seems to read it all for me.
- mkmk3 2y agoFor sure, I saw where it was skipping and I wouldn't have been surprised if it were intentional, but good to disprove. Thanks for checking, have a good day
- limo11 2y agoDid you have some iconic voice selected? It skipped most likely due to inappropriate content. You can try with some non iconic voice
- mkmk3 2y agoWasn't using an iconic voice but it does seem to be voice specific, good call
- macco 2y agoHow is the quality compared to speechify? I use it to listen to PDFs. It works, but has plenty of hiccups with headers, footers and colons.
- limo11 2y agoWay better
- sky2224 2y agoThe video shows scenarios of people listening to pdfs of pretty dense material (e.g., computer science, bio mechanics). Does anyone here actually have positive results doing this? It seems to me listening to anything that's even remotely complex with the intent of learning it just isn't something that's feasible.
- nice__two 2y agoThat’s my biggest gripe with audiobooks: good for fiction, not so good for learning.
- yreg 2y agoFor me they are actually best for non-fiction, but it has to be books. Papers are too information dense. I get easily distracted and lose attention while listening to an audiobook. This is usually problematic with fiction, because suddenly I don't know who this new character is or what's happening. And rewinding to the precise position where I stopped paying attention is of course much more difficult than in written text. I found that non-fiction books work great for me, because even if you ignore a page or two it makes no difference, the author keeps repeating their point and propping it up with many arguments anyway.
- woodson 2y agoI used to have papers read to me via TTS when I had a long commute. This was before the current crop of neural TTS, mind you, so the quality and naturalness wasn’t as good, but it was good enough to tolerate and to get the gist of a paper. It failed terribly on equations, of course, but that’s often not too important on the first reading.
- lynx97 2y ago[dead]
- qnleigh 2y agoIt depends a lot on the paper. I've been using a TTS app to read papers for years. Papers that are really equation dense, convey they key ideas in figures or get too detailed aren't listenable. But sometimes review articles or papers with one clear message hit that sweet spot and are very listenable. There's one topic where everything I know about it I learned by listening to a review article on a long run. It was actually quite pleasant!
- b33f 2y agoIs this streaming server-side audio or is the TTS running locally on device ? Can it work offline ?
- yawnxyz 2y agoall server-side you could build your local TTS using kokoro browser though — https://huggingface.co/spaces/webml-community/kokoro-webgpu https://huggingface.co/spaces/webml-community/kokoro-webgpu
- OhioMan2943 2y agoThis is definitely the future, I'm worried about the electric slip and slide world we're heading into though, where everything is completely spoonfed and consumptive. I can't help but think we're heading back into animalism.
- falcor84 2y ago> heading back into animalism Could you expand upon this? Any milestones towards that which we should be mindful of?
- OhioMan2943 2y agoTechnology is pretty quickly and apparently not only coming for our critical thinking, but our agency With llms, "knowing things" is already starting to feel like a thing of a past, not to me, but to a lot of others, there's no longer an incentive to "switch on". Why should a kid learn anything if a robot is instantly better at everything? Maths got replaced by calculators, deep critical thinking will get replaced by llms a lot of the time, which are word calculators, which is the closest thing we have to a logic calculator. This is more passive autopilot software, which further promotes learning as something you 'consume' rather than something you seek. The public consciousness has absolutely taken a semptember 11 tier nosedive since social media, we're approaching what I term cultual schizophrenia, which I posted about on my blog which I deleted, but I've readded it if you're interested [https://substack.com/home/post/p-156983317 https://substack.com/home/post/p-156983317]. There's no contextualisers in the media to give the right emphasis to the right things. This is just my perspective, from what I've seen from other younger people of my age. We are heading into extremely interesting times, everything profoundly destabalising thing we've speculated about is happening at the exact same time. We desperately need visionaries in politics. Basically I'm not doing too hot
- falcor84 2y agoSome good observations there, but I'm still unclear on why you used the term "animalism" - none of that seems to me at all similar to how other species engage with the world.
- hotpepperishot 2y ago[dead]
- Kabukks 2y agoLast time I tried Elevenlabs for German text, it got a lot of numbers and dates wrong. E. g. saying "1963" when the actual year in the text was 1967. Yeah, the voices sound very realistic. But I'm not sure how useful that is if you can't trust the spoken words. Does anyone know if it got better in the last weeks?
- aeroniero 2y agoYes, it's better now, at least on the Reader app that I've tried.
- jeswin 2y agoThe ad shows someone listening to an article or a story while driving a large vehicle - this is unsafe (depending on the individual). It's not like listening to music.
- yreg 2y agoI'm curious, is there evidence it is unsafe?
- jeswin 2y agoI can listen to a song while coding. I can't listen to a podcast while coding. A podcast demands way more attention than a song. 1.2 million people die in road accidents, and most of them are children and young people. Even more are seriously injured.
- cess11 2y agoAre you saying you can't drive a car if passengers are talking? If that's the case, maybe a driver's license isn't your thing?
- yreg 2y agoThat's a hypothesis but not evidence. I can present a counter-hypothesis: I fall asleep while listening to music (or staying in silence). Listening to spoken word keeps me awake or at least helps me notice that I'm getting tired. 1.2 million people die in road accidents, and most of them are children and young people. Even more are seriously injured.
- brokensegue 2y agoPeople listen to talk radio while driving all the time
- vunderba 2y agoIf there were any substantial evidence of this, they would have shutdown the entire A.M. spectrum 50 years ago.
- mozzieman 2y agoThe best ive heard but still too monotone over time compared too real productions. Feel blown away at first but listen a chapter or two gets difficult. Just a matter of time most likely until it becomes as good or better then the real thing.
- benrutter 2y agoI've been looking for a good and convenient way to read papers that are published in PDF for a while. Ideally, I'd be able to strip out the text content and send it to my kindle in readable form. Since apparently that's science fiction, this looks like a really good plan B! Will definitely give it a go.
- elashri 2y agoYou can jailbreak you kindle [1] and install KOReader[2] and this will allow you to do this science fiction. [1] https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/ https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/ [2] https://koreader.rocks/ https://koreader.rocks/
- janpmz 2y agoYou can try https://www.pdftomp3.com/ https://www.pdftomp3.com/ as well.
- billbrown 2y agoReadwise Reader does PDFs very well (and apparently can do TTS on them, but I've never tried that). https://docs.readwise.io/reader/docs/faqs/text-to-speech https://docs.readwise.io/reader/docs/faqs/text-to-speech
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoThis is excellent. I just tested the Finnish voices on my simple news archive [1], and the pronunciation was quite good and clear. It's unfortunate that I can't export audio clips locally; otherwise I would immediately look into using this for generating my Finnish flashcard decks from the same material [2]. I've thought about doing the same with the audio and video feeds included with this news broadcast, but getting Whisper to sync up properly with what's written down and cutting up the raw audio in that way still seems like more effort than I'm willing to invest right now. [1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/ https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/ [2]: https://github.com/Selkouutiset-Archive/selkokortti https://github.com/Selkouutiset-Archive/selkokortti
- gwd 2y ago> It's unfortunate that I can't export audio clips locally; otherwise I would immediately look into using this for generating my Finnish flashcard decks from the same material [2]. elevenlabs has an API which seemed quite reasonable when I looked into it. A bit of python should get you what you want pretty quickly.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoOh! I'll look into that, thanks.
- w3p706 2y agoI did exactly this for my finnish anki flashcards. you can see the implementation here: https://github.com/w3p706/anki-gen-fin/blob/main/ankigenfin/generate_audio.py https://github.com/w3p706/anki-gen-fin/blob/main/ankigenfin/... If you are looking to convert very short texts or words into speach, I had best result with eleven_multilingual_v2 with the following text for tts "Hän sanoo rauhallisesti ja hitaasti: <break time=\"1.0s\" /> '${text}'" An then i use a postprocessing to split at the silence. This was nessesary as you cannot set the language explicitly and it is detected from the input. With eleven_turbo_v2_5 you can set the language, but the results are not as good.
- darkwater 2y agoI know I'm growing old but this is the kind of tech application that I don't like. Arts should be the last thing to be 100% fully done by a program. Enhancing capabilities in artists? Hell yeah. Replacing completely voice actors? No, thanks.
- ramonverse 2y agoAI voice is literally the only way I have to "read" an obscure article during 1h non-static commutes.
- darkwater 2y agoI understand, It can do things that weren't previously possible, but it will also replace things that were done by humans, by artists before. Overall, in my opinion, is still a loss.
- nathanyukai 2y ago"replace things that were done by humans" isn't a loss by itself, if it frees up human labour to do other things. If human replaced by AI can't find better things to do, such that it makes them poorer, or anti-social its a loss but not necessarily AI's fault.
- Martinussen 2y agoDoesn't apply to all situations, but "replace things that were done by humans" in arts can absolutely be a loss by itself. Making graphics/speech/video a commodity doesn't replace designers, voice actors, or directors, but we've definitely see it can directly harm them and the people that enjoy their work. > can't find better things to do, such that it makes them poorer, or anti-social its a loss I feel like this misses the point a bit - lost income/sustainability for artists is obviously a big issue we'll be facing, but looking for a performance indicator in an artistic endeavour doesn't really get you anywhere. There's more ways to value a painting than "what the market would pay" and "potential heat output as firewood", right?
- woadwarrior01 2y agoHasn't this been around for ~4 months? Interesting to see this here, since their competitor Zyphra, just released two Apache 2.0 licensed open weights TTS models yesterday[1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43004589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43004589
- crakhamster01 2y agoThe generative podcasts feature feels so dystopian. I didn't realize this SNL skit was based off of a real product lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua4rYsMdC4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua4rYsMdC4U
- juliendorra 2y agoYou should try it with your own voice! (By first creating a custom voice on the web interface. The quick basic clone should be enough). I found that it’s my preferred way to use their reader, as it makes the reading more neutral and transparent for my brain.
- Klaster_1 2y agoPersonally, I can't stand my voice when I hear its recording. I wish there was a way to easily tune it to sound more like what you hear. Maybe even use that adjusted voice during calls.
- layer8 2y agoMost people don’t like hearing their own voice (how it sounds like in reality, not in your head).
- leumon 2y agoUnfortunately the app is not compatible with Android 15.
- jacek 2y agoI love the idea as I listen to a lot of podcasts and an occasional audiobook. The first impression is not that great. There's nothing natural about the voice. While individual words and phrases sound good, there's still no decent cadence and intonation. Feels flat and robotic. However, I will definitely experiment some more.
- yapyap 2y agoyeah, no thanks. if you are reading for information, I guess if this helps, sure go ahead. when reading for pleasure, this is not it though.
- cube2222 2y agoSo, I wanted to like this, but frankly the quality isn't fantastic. The text to speech is alright, but it lacks almost any emotion, and it reads everything literally, which when the article/pdf has a weird layout, or has figures, doesn't sound natural. Though I expect they're just not using their top-of-the-line models for this - I've had much more luck pushing a pdf through Claude to generate the "verbal version" (which is mostly literal, but also describes the layout and figures) and then the result through the top-of-the-line ElevenLabs model. Now, I've also checked out the podcast feature, and it's pretty clear they first do a textual generation, and then a simple text to speech. Again, lack of emotion, very mechanical flow. I made a podcast of a technical article[0] in both ElevenLabs reader and Google's NotebookLM, and the NotebookLM podcast is a night-and-day improvement - maybe they use a better model, maybe they use straight "article to podcast" end-to-end multimodal generation, I don't know, but the quality, flow, emotion, is just on a completely different level. I had to quickly turn off the ElevenLabs-generated podcast cause I couldn't keep listening to it, while NotebookLM's one is legitimately enjoyable. Now to finish on a more positive note, fingers crossed for the ElevenLabs team improving this, and us getting some competition in the area of article-to-audio, both podcast-style, and direct! I think, in general, it's a very promising product direction. Feature-wise, I would also love to get a daily overview podcast based on all my RSS feed articles for a given day. [0]: https://huggingface.co/blog/modernbert https://huggingface.co/blog/modernbert
- andrewstuart 2y agoTTS seemed to take a great leap forward a few years ago and seems to have stalled again. Services are expensive and in most cases the voices are easily detectable as not human. I would find it very hard to listen to such voices for a long period of time. Even ElevenLabs voices which seem to be known as the best have only a few that are really good quality but even then they're very, very far from the capabilities of a human.
- wink 2y ago> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). Probably because I have WebGL disabled in this browser. Not exactly sure what they're doing with it on the landing page, maybe the fluffy effects.
- whazor 2y agoIs there any technology that can do separate voices for each individual person speaking in an audiobook?
- xnx 2y agoZonos is a new open weights text-to-speech model that has quality at least as good as ElevenLabs: https://www.zyphra.com/post/beta-release-of-zonos-v0-1 https://www.zyphra.com/post/beta-release-of-zonos-v0-1
- pg5 2y agoWhen I type anything in their demo, it replies "I'm sorry but I can't I'm sorry but I can't..."
- waynenilsen 2y agoTTS is increasingly being commoditized. Kokoro was posted and it works on webgpu, absolutely incredible quality for where it can run https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42973769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42973769
- knowaveragejoe 2y agoKokoro hasn't released their encoder, but they are already moving on to a newer model. Hopefully they release that!
- nialv7 2y agoHey, they are using Mamba! Happy to see Mamba is used at least somewhere :/
- davidanekstein 2y agoI use ElevenLabs to narrate tutorials for my app and I’m a happy customer thus far. Here is an example: https://youtube.com/shorts/UKjqrydITLA?si=iC7ehp6LmlLH0M-U https://youtube.com/shorts/UKjqrydITLA?si=iC7ehp6LmlLH0M-U
- layer8 2y agoDoes this work for reading articles on websites?
- cooper_ganglia 2y agoThe company I work for has been using ElevenLabs to translate hour-long programs into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Greek, German, and Chinese. We have a large international audience, so it's worked great for this purpose! Before, we were hiring people to translate, and then hiring others to dub the audio. Now, our files are automatically translated and spoken in the voice of the actual speaker, and we just have a small Quality Control team of native speakers quickly verify the results are accurate. We've reduced costs and increased the quality of our translated media.
- rickcarlino 2y agoI wish there was a reader app that was serious about text speech. This is not it, unfortunately. Reader apps need to focus on a text to speech experience that is identical to a music player so that you can use the app while in hands free situations. The app is also hard to use as a “read it later” tool on iOS. I was really hoping they would fix these issues by now because it was promising. This app truly does feel like a portfolio demo app for a text to speech engine company rather than an actual reader app. UPDATE: yes, I have actually used the app, no it does not work well. See replies for details.
- rickcarlino 2y agoIt’s interesting that they show people going on runs and driving cars in their demo videos. I’m pretty sure nobody developing that app has actually gone on a run or driven a car while using their app.
- wrsh07 2y agoWow really? I use it all the time for ~equivalent activities
- rickcarlino 2y agoHow long are the articles you are reading? I’m reading blog articles rather than long form content. My queue is in the hundreds and the articles very in length from two minutes to 20 minutes. I found it really annoying to need to push buttons while driving to skip or auto play the next article.
- wrsh07 2y agoYeah, mostly super long form stuff. If it's only 2 minutes it's faster for me to just read it than to open it in their reader Fwiw, I would use their app way more if it were better. Right now I use it for 1-2 long form articles at a time, I am sometimes willing to push buttons in order to stay focused but will bail out to eg my podcasts app if that becomes untenable
- Kerbiter 2y agoWould've been great as a TTS component that could be installed and used in existing e-readers.
- freefaler 2y agoAndroid Moon Reader Pro TTS plugin works OK for me.
- sys32768 2y agoI was briefly excited to try this on out-of-print books I find on Google Books, but alas the OCR in Acrobat PRO is super glitchy. I need to find some AI-assist OCR to fix tons of mistakes like "186o" for 1860 or "gla)" for glad.
- eigenvalue 2y agoI made a site like that, fixmydocuments.com Also check out my open source project for that: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/llm_aided_ocr https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/llm_aided_ocr
- sys32768 2y agoWill definitely check it out. Hyphenated words, page numbers and chapter titles seem to be my main issue. I can easily do search and replace on chapter titles though.
- dazzaji 2y agoI rely on ElevenReader several times a week for quick text to voice on snippets of text I’m working on or sometimes on full web pages when I hand it a url. It’s quick and easy to use and the performance and quality is high.
- smoothbenny 2y agoTried this app last week w/ an EPUB. It read all of the drop caps as individual letters, before moving on to the remaining portion of the word. It said “tilde” before each item in an unordered list. Too distracting to be of any practical use for me, unless there’s a setting I missed.
- _qua 2y agoI recognize and appreciate that this is free right now. But surely it won't always be. And I can't keep paying $10-20/mo for every individual AI tool.
- berbec 2y agoI have used Moon+ Reader [1] for years with the build-in Android TTS service. It works very well, is free, and sounds good enough for me. 1: https://moondownload.com/ https://moondownload.com/
- eitally 2y agoReadEra is pretty good, too. I used it to listen to books 2 & 3 of The Three Body Problem series last year .
- randysalami 2y agoI’ve actually used this extensively for months now since it’s free and works with PDFs I’ve downloaded off the internet. I was so frustrated with ridiculously overpriced TTS (must pay for annual sub! no monthly) when I found this gem. My main use case is comp. sci and philosophy books. I download PDFs of varying quality off the internet onto my phone and import them into this app. The text translation is always solid but for the former, graphs and diagrams really break it. It’s a tricky problem because these often are important to the text so skipping them (for the app) isn’t ideal but the current solution just makes the reader goof up. I think it would be cool if the model could identify these objects and maybe generate some text describing the object and TTSing that. Minor gripe and for the latter, it’s perfect. I’ve probably used this app for 70 reading hours at 1.5x speed across long road trips and walking my dog at the park. I’ve gotten through numerous books I wouldn’t have and for free. I’m happy! (annoying bug I find often: it seems certain characters or tokens just break it and it freezes. I need to manually skip ahead hoping it doesn’t get stuck again. Really detracts from the hands free nature and is difficult to manage while driving)
- flakiness 2y agoAre there any good papers from which I can learn the recent development of TTS tech?
- jdlyga 2y agoThe voices are excellent, but the app needs work. It lost my place in a book a few times, so I switched back to VoiceDream (don't use VoiceDream, it stinks unless you're a legacy purchaser).
- wedn3sday 2y agoI immediately copy/pasted in some smut to check if it was going to lecture me on my moral failings and was pleasantly shocked to find a corporate AI model that did what I asked without pushing puritanical nonsense one me.
- kstrauser 2y agoThe company won’t let you say “arse” though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43048345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43048345
- zoba 2y agoI've been enjoying this app except I could not find a way to export the content to an audio file. I want to send the content to others - I'd even take a link to a website with a Play button (just not one that forces an app download)
- BeetleB 2y agoIf you want free/ultracheap, the Google Cloud TTS is good enough for simple use cases. You get enough free minutes that it may end up being free (I think I've paid a cent so far). Some of their voices sound very artificial, some very real. I've been slowly making a list of the good ones. I use it to convert long articles into audio, and have a script to add it to my podcast feed to listen to while driving: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2024/Apr/reading-articles-via-podcast-software/ https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2024/Apr/reading-articles-via-p...
- kvn8888 2y agoChirp (HD) gives you $30 per 1M characters for free on the free tier also
- BeetleB 2y agoI'd have to analyze my usage. For me, having used it for over a year cost me a penny. If I can ensure my total cost is less than $1/month, I'll consider it if the quality is really good. The Google one is "good enough", but not great. One other feature I'd really like: Having the AI figure out who is saying what and use different voices (e.g. one voice for overall narrator, and separate voices for each person who is quoted in the article). Not sure if any of the solutions out there do that automatically without my guidance. (Still probably wouldn't pay more than $2/mo for it - I just don't use it often enough to justify paying much).
- ratedgene 2y agoHonestly, why isn't this same service baked into my OS? the reader there is really atrocious, but I imagine even for a single voice a pretty small model can be downloaded and made available as a plugin for the reader app.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- codybontecou 2y agoI just wish this had a Chrome Extension so I can listen to article while on my computer.
- gtirloni 2y agoThe ToS are a nightmare, as usual for these services.
- mindwork 2y agoDownloaded the app and inserted 3 publicly visible URLs. Only last one was to be downloaded and listened. Not sure whether it's their UserAgent string or what
- zeroq 2y agoA friend of mine is an actor (cinema, tv, theater) who makes a significant amount of his income as a voice actor. For a long time I wanted to make a game - think The Stanley Parable or Thomas Was Alone - that would be narrated by the voice of either David Attenborough or Morgan Freeman. You know, it's a low hanging fruit, you can have a two hours long footage of zebras running around narrated by either of these and it's suddenly eerily fascinating. So far I'm AI skeptic, but this voice thing really makes me think about an actual shift in how certain jobs can become irrelevant in foreseeable future.
- tarponjargon 2y agotry https://clipcast.it https://clipcast.it Ingests URLs in a variety of ways, converts to natural language audio, puts it in your podcast feed. Free to use.
- saeedesmaili 2y agoIt's a nice idea, but pretty much useless without a pocket integration or an api to programmatically import content.