I do a lot of traveling, and love consuming information via audio. I’m actually working on technology for natural narration of web content. I’d be happy to create high quality narration for all content on the site that you can embed into post pages. Feel free to reply or contact me if you’re interested :)
I’m working on tech of the “quality text-to-speech” variety, especially for content that’s longer than a few sentences, as a component of my project to make audio web browsing rich, delightful, and ubiquitous.
(For everyone else, curious if this quality would be sufficient to be beneficial? I’m not actually a podcast listener myself so I’m not sure what’s considered good)
For me this does compare favorably to the TTS already built into the getpocket.com app, which also has a) follow along with text b) speed control features.
It’d be no problem to include speed control features in the first version, and text highlighting shortly thereafter (I already have this feature in my mobile app.)
Cool! Certainly that’s among the better ones I’ve heard. (A couple hiccups here and there overall pretty solid)
note: still off the cuff and haven’t checked in with other site devs, this is in the “curious how this might work” stage.
What’s the process for that like? Right now is it just software running on your computer? How long does it take to render the sound? How resource intensive is it? Is there or could there be a webserver that our site could easily communicate with when new posts appear (or maybe when posts get over a certain karma, or moved to frontpage or curated)
Thanks! The audio was rendered via a narration web service I wrote for the backend of my project. It took 12 seconds to narrate and generate metadata (used to highlight the word or sentence that’s being spoken).
I’d be happy to set something up such that you could post the contents of a new post to a webhook, and it could respond with embed code immediately. Placing the embed code e.g. under the post title would load a small widget you could play the audio from.
It’s also possible to tune the narration quality specifically for LessWrong so it uses the proper lexicon and more natural emphasis :)
I do a lot of traveling, and love consuming information via audio. I’m actually working on technology for natural narration of web content. I’d be happy to create high quality narration for all content on the site that you can embed into post pages. Feel free to reply or contact me if you’re interested :)
Is the tech you’re working on of the “quality text-to-speech” variety, or something different? Not quite sure I parsed your words.
I’m working on tech of the “quality text-to-speech” variety, especially for content that’s longer than a few sentences, as a component of my project to make audio web browsing rich, delightful, and ubiquitous.
As an example, here’s narration of this post: (Narration of Fading Novelty).
(For everyone else, curious if this quality would be sufficient to be beneficial? I’m not actually a podcast listener myself so I’m not sure what’s considered good)
For me this does compare favorably to the TTS already built into the getpocket.com app, which also has a) follow along with text b) speed control features.
It’d be no problem to include speed control features in the first version, and text highlighting shortly thereafter (I already have this feature in my mobile app.)
Cool! Certainly that’s among the better ones I’ve heard. (A couple hiccups here and there overall pretty solid)
note: still off the cuff and haven’t checked in with other site devs, this is in the “curious how this might work” stage.
What’s the process for that like? Right now is it just software running on your computer? How long does it take to render the sound? How resource intensive is it? Is there or could there be a webserver that our site could easily communicate with when new posts appear (or maybe when posts get over a certain karma, or moved to frontpage or curated)
Thanks! The audio was rendered via a narration web service I wrote for the backend of my project. It took 12 seconds to narrate and generate metadata (used to highlight the word or sentence that’s being spoken).
I’d be happy to set something up such that you could post the contents of a new post to a webhook, and it could respond with embed code immediately. Placing the embed code e.g. under the post title would load a small widget you could play the audio from.
It’s also possible to tune the narration quality specifically for LessWrong so it uses the proper lexicon and more natural emphasis :)
Please please please make this happen!