This is great! I have a dyslectic friend that may benefit from this, so I’ll be sure to tell him.
I think it would be great to go even further and have this as an in-built feature on the website, so (ideally) for any every article you could click on a listen to this article button and listen to an auto-generated reading. This has far less friction and is more accessible to those who don’t know about the library or don’t use any podcast apps (like me). It can also scale better for multiple voices, if that’s a desired feature.
ETA: If it’s an in-built feature then it can also be applied to comments and tags, which could also be very useful.
If creating an audio version of each post is too expensive, then perhaps it could be limited to a certain Karma score like you’re doing right now, or only do it for posts when someone first clicks the button.
Perhaps as a step towards that something can be added to the post page on the site that shows when there’s an audio version available and either links to Spotify or directly to the MP3 file?
I would like to see older posts also get audio versions, there are many good old posts and I don’t see a reason to heavily prioritize new posts (also, more selfishly, I would love to have audio versions of my own posts that pass the threshold but were posted before this project began)
Question: If an article passes the karma threshold only a week after it’s posted, will it still be narrated? In other words, what’s the threshold to pass the threshold? :)
(Two small suggestions: I’d put the link to the audio version of this post before the first paragraph, and I’d add another link to the library at the end of the post.)
First of all—the narration quality is amazing. I had no idea such good narration exists. I listened to allthepeopleyoucouldcometo love while also reading it, and the narration only flopped when there was some sort of typo in the text itself (like forgetting a space after the dot at the end of a sentence, “like.so”, making it read out the dot). There were several sentences that a human could have done much better due to understanding the intentions and being able to match the intonation to fit, but it didn’t feel deal-breaking (even though it was fiction, which I expect is harder to narrate well).
With that, it feels pretty inaccessible to me. In large part it’s because I don’t use any podcast app, (also uploading it to YouTube would help), but even if I did, then when I want to listen to a post instead of reading it, I have to find the nonlinear library page on one of those apps, then search for the specific posts there (hopefully not by scrolling, but from my experience this seems to be the only way :/). I guess this isn’t a problem for those who use it instead of the frontpage of LW/EAF, which are the main audience for this, but it would still be nice if it worked better for “dual users”. Hopefully in the future my suggestion of integrating it to the website would be implemented, cause I think that’s the best way to do it.
This is great! I have a dyslectic friend that may benefit from this, so I’ll be sure to tell him.
I think it would be great to go even further and have this as an in-built feature on the website, so (ideally) for any every article you could click on a listen to this article button and listen to an auto-generated reading. This has far less friction and is more accessible to those who don’t know about the library or don’t use any podcast apps (like me). It can also scale better for multiple voices, if that’s a desired feature.
ETA: If it’s an in-built feature then it can also be applied to comments and tags, which could also be very useful.
If creating an audio version of each post is too expensive, then perhaps it could be limited to a certain Karma score like you’re doing right now, or only do it for posts when someone first clicks the button.
Perhaps as a step towards that something can be added to the post page on the site that shows when there’s an audio version available and either links to Spotify or directly to the MP3 file?
I would like to see older posts also get audio versions, there are many good old posts and I don’t see a reason to heavily prioritize new posts (also, more selfishly, I would love to have audio versions of my own posts that pass the threshold but were posted before this project began)
Question: If an article passes the karma threshold only a week after it’s posted, will it still be narrated? In other words, what’s the threshold to pass the threshold? :)
(Two small suggestions: I’d put the link to the audio version of this post before the first paragraph, and I’d add another link to the library at the end of the post.)
Some feedback after trying it for a bit.
First of all—the narration quality is amazing. I had no idea such good narration exists. I listened to all the people you could come to love while also reading it, and the narration only flopped when there was some sort of typo in the text itself (like forgetting a space after the dot at the end of a sentence, “like.so”, making it read out the dot). There were several sentences that a human could have done much better due to understanding the intentions and being able to match the intonation to fit, but it didn’t feel deal-breaking (even though it was fiction, which I expect is harder to narrate well).
With that, it feels pretty inaccessible to me. In large part it’s because I don’t use any podcast app, (also uploading it to YouTube would help), but even if I did, then when I want to listen to a post instead of reading it, I have to find the nonlinear library page on one of those apps, then search for the specific posts there (hopefully not by scrolling, but from my experience this seems to be the only way :/). I guess this isn’t a problem for those who use it instead of the frontpage of LW/EAF, which are the main audience for this, but it would still be nice if it worked better for “dual users”. Hopefully in the future my suggestion of integrating it to the website would be implemented, cause I think that’s the best way to do it.