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EricHerboso comments on LessWrong podcasts - Less Wrong
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Seriously? Are you sure you've been comparing good narrators to that TTS voice?
For me, a good narrator will win out in an overwhelming majority of cases where I can choose between TTS and a good narrator.
A good narrator is, by definition, superior to a TTS (and as TTS improves, voiceover professionals will have to up their game).
But what is superior to a TTS, though, will vary according to the listener. What I want of a good narrator, for example (and I am moved to post this from having heard various storytellers of fiction), is someone who keeps him- or herself out of the matter, and is simply an intermediary, like a newsreader or simultaneous translator. As far as I'm concerned, it's a voice, not a person. I don't want a person chattering in my ear when what I want is the text. The voiceover artist's job is, in fact, to be a better TTS.
Hm, that's interesting, because I generally look for just the opposite in podcasts, particularly fiction.
When I read text, the voice in my head emphasizes certain parts and changes tone in response to the content of the text, at a reasonably high level of abstraction (i.e. just looking at the syntax and formatting isn't enough). If a narrator isn't doing that, I have a hard time getting into the reading.
Yeah, seriously. And I have a large amount of experience with different narrators. I find that having one fixed voice aids my comprehension and I don't care that much about how sonorous the voice is. If I could take my pick of a narrators, and some how get a text to speech version of their voice I would pick that and only listen to them to get the effect, but that isn't in the cards.
Interesting. I love how everyone has such different preferences.
We're definitely going to stick strictly to the human-narrated content, but there is certainly a growing market of services which can get you your TTS content and we think they have a place too.
Which text to speech program do you use?
Textaloud. I describe my method a bit here.
2 - 5 books a day was an exaggeration, I think. It's usually 2 - 3.