Thanks. It’s a nice idea. At some point we might enable authors (or listeners!) to select their favourite voices. This would increase our costs quite a lot (see my reply to Nathan) so I doubt we’ll do this before end 2023, unless we find evidence of strong demand.
Thanks! We looked into randomising between a couple voices a while ago. To my surprise, we found that all the voice models on our text-to-speech service (Microsoft Azure) perform somewhat differently. This means our quality assurance costs would go up quite a lot if we start using several voices.
I’d also guess that once listeners become familiar with a particular voice, their comprehension improves and they’re able to listen faster. I have some anecdotal evidence of this, but I’m pretty unsure how big of a deal it is.
Thanks! I would have liked to do this, but in our quick tests the UK female voice models provided by our text-to-speech service (Microsoft Azure) were quite buggy. We frequently experiment with the latest voice models on Azure and other platforms, so I expect we’ll find a good UK female option in the coming months.
Would you prefer a female narrator?
Sample (Sara, US).
Agree vote if “yes”, disagree vote if “no”.
Let each author decide?
Thanks. It’s a nice idea. At some point we might enable authors (or listeners!) to select their favourite voices. This would increase our costs quite a lot (see my reply to Nathan) so I doubt we’ll do this before end 2023, unless we find evidence of strong demand.
Randomise? Or different narrators for different topics?
Thanks! We looked into randomising between a couple voices a while ago. To my surprise, we found that all the voice models on our text-to-speech service (Microsoft Azure) perform somewhat differently. This means our quality assurance costs would go up quite a lot if we start using several voices.
I’d also guess that once listeners become familiar with a particular voice, their comprehension improves and they’re able to listen faster. I have some anecdotal evidence of this, but I’m pretty unsure how big of a deal it is.
Maybe include female / UK as another reference point, so we’re not comparing across two dimensions at once?
Thanks! I would have liked to do this, but in our quick tests the UK female voice models provided by our text-to-speech service (Microsoft Azure) were quite buggy. We frequently experiment with the latest voice models on Azure and other platforms, so I expect we’ll find a good UK female option in the coming months.