[justech]

This topic has always interested me. For people looking for a free alternative (free for Apple users), I recommend looking into iOS and MacOS spoken content under Accessibility [0]

It's a bit finicky at times but the pros are

1. Free

2. It works on anything on your iPhone, iPad or Mac screen

3. Apple's Siri voices are actually really good! (Better than Speechify voices)

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ph/guide/iphone/iph96b214f0/ios

[adi4213]

> For people looking for a free alternative (free for Apple users)

Thanks for pointing this out. Fwiw we do hope to continue providing a useful free tier with users, I appreciate your comment because it leverages services that iOS/macOS users reliably have for free by virtue of being an Apple user

> Apple's Siri voices are actually really good! (Better than Speechify voices)

This is really interesting - particularly because Speechify makes a pretty substantial amount of revenue from paid subscriptions. I imagine that Apple has the resources and capability to continue to improve their voice quality

[WhitneyLand]

Wait, Samantha one of the default Siri voices, sounds not even even close to the quality of what I heard in the examples above for this app.

I think it’s the same that Safari uses for the “Listen to this page” feature?

The two don’t seem comparable even. What am I missing?

[justech]

Also there's two versions of the Samantha voice. One is 11 mb (downloaded by default) and another is 152mb (have to download from settings). The improvement with the 150mb version is very noticeable

[WhitneyLand]

Thank you, that is a big difference.

With the better voice downloaded, what’s your opinion on the quality difference between the app here and iOS?

[adi4213]

Oration uses OpenAI's text-to-speech system, which I personally found to have superior quality to Apple's (but I also downloaded the upgraded Samantha voice and have been enjoying using it, so I appreciate the recommendation!)

[tymscar]

Wow I didn’t know. Thats basically perfect for me. Thank you!

[justech]

Did you try downloading the bigger Siri voices? I'm using English (US) Voices -> Siri -> Voice 5 (90mb)

[luigi23]

unfortunately it has to be finnicky, otherwise it'd cannibalize audiobooks apps (amazon got angry recently)

[jasonjmcghee]

I don't think that's true. SOTA open source is still much worse than eleven labs and requires a dedicated modern GPU for any kind of speed of generation. Certainly can't on-demand, on-device on an iPhone.

Apple already is doing very high quality generated audiobooks, but you do it for your book as the author.

https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-aud...

"Mitchell" sounds exactly like a very popular narrator "Ray Porter".