That's cool, but I guess I was specifically looking for something more advanced than basic text-to-speech (which most browsers nowadays have built in and can be achieved in 2 lines of JavaScript[0]). I was specifically looking for high quality natural speech sounding generated audio.
Cool app. The biggest issue for me is the voice sounds very much like the typical system voice apps, when we are seeing such leaps and bounds in the voice quality. But your interface is simple and nice.
Yeah technical papers probably wouldn't be a good use case. And definitely not what I had in mind. I was thinking about thinkpieces and older books that missed the audiobook trend
I've also been really interests in finding a way to make ai tts able to read equations. I'm currently pursuing my phd in physics and i listen to tts of textbooks in the gym. There just aren't human podcasts over the thing i need to learn right now for class, but if that dang tts could only read equations I'd be set!
A great way to learn something is to listen to a conversation among two to four well informed and articulate people, where each person has a memorable personality and each person has a different perspective about the topic.
This Google Illuminate experiment shows how just listening to two voices discuss a technical paper for three minutes is far more effective than reading a three-minute AI summary of the paper.
Imagine if there were three or four voices, with varied personalities, more humor and sarcasm, different priorities and points of view, and even a little disagreement.
Then imagine you're not just listening to the conversation, but you're participating in it. That seems like a pretty amazing way to learn.
I have a nonfiction draft built on conversations between 4 friends. Started as a regular nonfiction book but quickly realized the desired mainstreet audience would never read it. I created personas (as in UX style goal-directed design personas) to describe each character’s background, POV, goals, expertise, values, concerns and questions. Different than anything else I’ve ever written. Still very rough but rewarding.
[0] https://playtext.app