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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> A screen reader intercepts what's happening on the screen and presents that information via braille (through a separate braille display) or synthetic speech. And it's not the kind of synthetic speech you hear in today's smart assistants. I use a robotic-sounding voice which speaks at around 450 words per minute.

After listening to the English sample....maybe I'm being naive but is it typical to be able to understand computer speech at that rate? I could barely make out a handful of words and probably wouldn't have believed there was a text to understand in there if the words weren't above it.

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You work your way up to it. Open up a podcast app and start listening at 1.5x. After a while (days to weeks), that becomes comfortable. Then work your way up to 2.0x. Once you're at that point, listening to familiar shows (familiar people/voices), at 1.0x makes them sound drunk. They seem. to. speak. so. slooow.

Some podcasts I listen at 3x which feels near my limit of comfort (comprehension drops off at speeds higher than that), but I suspect nearly any normal person can get used to 2x speed. When you are, you can absorb twice as much information in the same amount of time.

(The above applies to talk type podcasts. Music is best at 1x, and dramatizations and such are often best left at 1x to get correct pacing).

I've tried going faster but found that I had to concentrate too hard on listening to leave time for reflection during the listening, which is the whole point for me of listening podcasts. I wonder if a blind person struggles with similar issues, where they have to dose the speed reading to allow them to actually think about what they heard.

Instead of listening to a podcast/audiobook once on normal speed, you could try listening to it twice on double speed.

* Especially audiobooks generally have only one core idea so even if you miss a part, you're not missing much.

* By listing twice, you will 'revisit' the topic, increasing comprehension.

* Most podcasts/audiobooks actually don't have a lot of new ideas (especially after you've heard a lot of them), so in those cases you're only wasting half the time.

When you listen to a podcast at 3x do you focus solely on the podcast or are you able to do something else too? For example cooking? Or driving?

I pretty routinely listen to podcasts and audiobooks at 2-2.5x, and I could understand the English audio just fine. Not sure that I'd _want_ to listen to it that quickly, but I can understand why if that were your interface with your computer that you would.

I wish my Roku box would provide a speedup option, as well as my Comcast DVR.

You are comparing your first time trying to digest rapid speech, compared to someone who has done it for years. Yes, it's typical.

A new screen-reader user would start such an endeavour at normal speed, then gradually increase the speed. It's not much more different to people listening to podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5x speed. The robotic voice is more of a help than a hinderance because of it's consistency.

It may be typical if you are blind. It isn't if you are not (though obviously, you could train for it). Keep also in mind that the human brain has incredible capabilities when it's highly focused. Not having visual input removes a lot of distraction for our reptilian brain always scanning for threats.

In college, I had a friend who is blind and her screen reader speed setting was insane. I couldn't understand most of it despite being someone who watches videos and listens to audiobooks at 2x.

Her typing speed was also amazing. I have never seen anyone type that fast before or since.

The speech becomes surprisingly clear if you listen to it and read the paragraph at the same time.

Sure but that's obviously not how it's used. Also, for the first one which is the one he's actually using I couldn't make out a single word even when reading at the same time.

It's like learning a foreign language. At first, native speakers seem to speak so fast that all words flow into each other without distinction.

As you improve, you begin noticing words you already know, and when someone speaks deliberately slow, you can puzzle together sentences.

Eventually, you can understand speech at a normal conversational speed. Most people probably stop at that level, because they don't need more.

But e.g. when watching recorded lectures, I tend to crank up the speed to 1.5x or even 2x until I need to think more about something. The sped-up speech is mostly still quite understandable.

There is no reason to suppose you can't improve your hearing beyond the limits on humans' ability to form coherent thoughts from scratch and move their mouth in the right pattern. Just keep increasing the speed, attune yourself to the artificial voice and then increase it even more until you're at a level that makes untrained people feel like non-native speakers.

Yes, actually, having worked in speech synthesis for a while I was surprised to find that's how frequent users generally do use it. Although IIRC 450wpm is still on the high side - I think maybe 2-300wpm was more common, albeit that's still pretty unintelligible to most of us. I imagine maybe he can distinguish higher speech rates using quality headphones than coming from, say, a phone speaker though.

I wonder the same. I often listen to videos at 1.5-1.8x. I can listen to faster, but after about 2-2.5x it becomes enjoyable. As I need full concentration to parse the speech and miss out on the visual experience. Perhaps being blind the audio processing is heightened or just the visual distraction is absent allowing full concentration on the audio?

I would imagine that the consistent robotic voice helps too, allowing large chunks of text and whole sentences to be processed as a single pattern, like when speed reading.

You're not alone, I have overheard many hours of this type of speech and never figured out how to listen to it. I think it is something you have to work up to a bit at a time.

It's gibberish to me too, but surely it's something that can be learned.

I downloaded it and set the tempo 60 percent lower, and it's still difficult. It's not just the speed...the quality of the synthesis is pretty bad. I bet it takes quite a bit of time to get good at it.

Aren't both English but with different accents?

Finnish has highly regular pronunciation with almost 1-to-1 correspondance between letters and sounds. In the first clip English is read as if it was Finnish, using Finnish pronunciation rules. Works pretty well as Finnish would be pronounced correctly and for Finnish speaker it's quite easy to catch Finnish pronunciations of foreign words.

No. without reopening the article, I thought one was Finnish read with an English accent. This was due to what the author had grown accustomed. In his youth screen readers did not have as many options?

>I'm reading English with a Finnish speech synthesizer

I think it's English but the robot voice is geared for Finnish speech patterns.

I think it was the opposite - English read with a Finnish accent.

It's not just an accent. It's reading the words as if they were Finnish, so totally different.

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