[NoMoreNicksLeft]

We bought the $300/month plan for a few months earlier this year... and you'd only get 40 hours of audio generation for that. It wasn't really sufficient to our needs.

How many audio books is 40 hours?

Also, while its voice cloning was truly amazing, every once in awhile the voice would get a little nutty and sound like an insect just flew down their throat, or maybe they had an LSD flashback. Normal normal normal then it's some Bobcat Goldthwaite skit. And if you dialed down that parameter (I think it's called stability?) then it goes monotone really quickly.

We're probably several years out from it being something people use personally for audio books.

[echelon]

> We bought the $300/month plan for a few months earlier this year... and you'd only get 40 hours of audio generation for that. It wasn't really sufficient to our needs.

All of these AI as a Service (AaaS?) API companies are going to race each other to razor thin margins. Immediately after ElevenLabs raised, five other TTS services raised nearly the same amount of money.

[dylan604]

>How many audio books is 40 hours?

Are you reading War & Peace or Cat In The Hat?

[Jeff_Brown]

I always assume 200.to 250 pages per book when someone talks about large quantities of books.

[satvikpendem]

That's fairly short. I read about 100 books a year and it includes thousand page tomes like The Count of Monte Cristo.

[dylan604]

I always assumed that book to be rather short since it just needs to be a number of sandwiches eaten.

100 books/year. That's an impressive feat regardless the number of pages. Are these downloaded ebooks or physical printed copies of books?

[satvikpendem]

It's mostly audiobooks, I have some ePubs that don't have audiobooks anywhere, such as many Japanese light novel fan (or official) translations into English for example. I can get through them as I can understand audio faster than I can read text, as I play back at 3 to 5x speed.

[dylan604]

what's your retention/comprehension of the content at those speeds? i find that those speeds allows me to understand the concept as it's whizzing by, but the retention of it is not good. everything i've ever been taught and personal experience about long term retention all say speed is not the most conducive.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I like to read with my eyes, not listen. I honestly have no idea how long an audio book is, hours-wise.

I've seen a few for download, and they're always like hundreds of meg, if not over a gig. And that's in mp3, where it should be compressed heavily.

[squeaky-clean]

In my audible library, the shortest is the first Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a 5h51m. The longest is The Power Broker at 66h9m. Most of the books I have are in the 15-25 hour range, but I also have a lot of fantasy stuff that gets near 50 hours (Game of Thrones, Brandon Sanderson...).

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Well, then we're talking $300 to have ElevenLabs do a single GoT book, but maybe as many as 8 books for HHGTG-style stuff.

That's just not good value. Was sort of my point.