Thanks Anna, there’s a whole raft of these AI audio from text services… but checking out Natural Readers and the voices are pretty good, style synthetic… which voice did you use? Can you share a link to an example so others can see what a voice read OER chapter sounds like?
I played a bit with trial version of Murf – my idle curiosity is about what / how AI is used in this technology? I mean voice generator tech has been built into my Mac since like 2010, I have previously used the say
command to generate audio from text.
And I know a number of people who still blog use services like Trinity Audio to do automatic voice generated text from their writings – I thought of @clintlalonde who’s blog I saw this on first (example) and Trinity has no indication it is AI flavored. My guess is that in theory/wild guessing, the Natural Language Processing of AI can perhaps generate audio that is less robotic ? That’s what I infer from
What would be interesting to know from people who use generated audio to read, is, what makes the audio most useful? Does it help to have a more human voice, or is robotic good enough?
I’m really interested to hear more from OER producers who are using solutions to provide this kind of accessibility options, and also if it helps the visually impaired to have the audio provided with the OER or if they prefer relying on other assistive technology to read OER text.