Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by syntaxing 649 days ago
I’ve been using the ElevenLabs Reader app to read some articles during my drive and it’s been amazing. It’s great to be able to listen to Money Stuff whenever I want to. The audio quality is about 90% there. Occasionally, the tone of the sentence is wrong (like surprised when it should be sad) and the wrong enunciation (bow, like bowing down or tying a bow) but still very listenable.
1 comments

I like that app, too.

The reading is very natural overall, though sometimes the emphasis is a bit off. What catches my ear is when Word A in a sentence receives stronger stress than Word B, but the longer context suggests that actually it should be Word B with the greater emphasis. An inexperienced human reader might miss that as well, but a professional narrator who is thinking about the overall meaning would get it right.

I prefer professional human narration when it is available, but the Reader app’s ability to handle nearly any text is wonderful. AI-read narration can have another advantage: clarity of enunciation. Even the most skillful human narrator sometimes slurs a consonant or two; the ElevenLabs voices render speech sounds distinctly while still sounding natural.