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Comment by wenbin | Hacker News Reader

Awesome project!

However, I find that when I realize a podcast is generated using AI and synthetic audio, I immediately lose interest. For me, the value of podcasts lies in authentic human conversations, and AI-generated content just doesn’t have the same appeal.

Probably it's just me being obsessed with old-school podcasts, though. I do believe there are listeners (not sure if many or few) who don't mind if a podcast is AI-generated.

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Funny, I've been using even primitive text-to-speech on PDFs for years and while nothing compares to an excellent human reader, I find TTS often better than a mediocre human reading. This is mainly because I don't get upset at (and then have to forgive) a machine when it says the "Loovree" instead of the Louvre or in an economic history book pronounces "Keens" for John Maynard Keynes (sound like "Kaynes"). Also the dead neutrality of a machine's reading can jar me less than a numbskull and/or phony human rendition. I must say though that excellent voice actors are to me heaven.

What extensions/apps would you recommend?

I have tried to set up something similar with text-to-speech browsers extension but I loose my place if I have to close and reopen.

On Mac with a pdf I just select say a chapter and let it read. Footnotes can be a problem. I usually use iOS now and I wrote PDF before but realize I use .epub files mostly. You can set up iOS to read entire pages. I use the local iOS Books app and have it so a two-finger swipe from the top of a page starts reading. It will usually turn pages by itself but can be a bit janky. I choose a good quality voice and have spent ten or twenty minutes rigging it up in Settings.

It's all far from perfect.

That's interesting, for me, podcasts are just news articles or books that I don't have the time to sit down and read. The only time I listen to podcasts and audiobooks are when I am walking around or doing chores. Yes, many podcasts have a human element to them that is nice, but just as many are still useful without a human, as for these ones, I'm primarily there for the information itself, not who conveys it.

It’s almost certainly the case that the most profitable and popular podcasts are ones built around the personality of their host(s) and not because the content is merely in audio form. So while this tool is useful for listening to information instead of reading it, the likelihood of a major podcast being entirely AI-generated is pretty low.

Just a tangent, fans are obssessed with certain artists, say, TSwift, because of their personality rather than pure voice and lyrics. That's why concerts are so fucking popular.

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