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Comment by catalogia | Hacker News Reader

I use Apple's TTS to read books. It may not sound like a human, but after a few hours of listening to it the strange nature of the voice gets abstracted away by your brain. It's very functional. I knocked out Neal Stephenson's Anathem a week ago in about two days using TTS to read probably 75% of it.

What it doesn't do is the acting. In an audiobook, the voice actor will change their voice in various ways for dramatic effect, and in that respect the book becomes something like a radio drama. With TTS you're getting "just the book". I think that's the major difference and the refuge in which voice actors might hope for continued employment.

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I can imagine using TTS to catch up on news articles, magazine articles, reviewing a textbook, maybe even listening to opinion columns while out on the go or multitasking with my Photoshop time, but I can't imagine it doing anything except ruining a novel, or anything else involving drama or comedy.

Far from ruining novels, it's quite pleasant. After you've become accustomed to it, it becomes a very low-fatigue way to read for extended periods of time. I find books read by TTS are just as immersive as reading print. In fact the experience of TTS and reading print seem closer to me than print vs audiobooks.

I guess what I'm saying is don't underestimate neuroplasticity. I wager you could even achieve casual fluency with morse code if you listened to it long enough. I'm under the impression that some telegraph operators did.

That's really interesting. Basically the audiobook is more of an interpretation of the text. It's perhaps closer to a movie adaptation. Once you lose the exception for the TTS to "tell you a story" but rather to "tell you the words", it becomes just a different input stream. I didn't think about it like that until now. I'll give it a try.

I do this as well. I used Samsung's TTS engine at first, but Google's has mostly caught up. As a bonus, I can switch between listening (in the car or working out) and reading (most other times) without losing my place.

I listen to a lot of non-fiction in TTS but I haven't found it all that satisfactory for novels. Although part of the reason is if I'm listening to a novel via TTS it's because there isn't an audiobook available and I've had to do some hacky OCR to get the text in the first place.

The audible audiobook version of Anathem is extremely good in my opinion. Probably one of my favorite readings... I’m surprised that speech synthesis does a reasonable job given the language involved.

The Audible version of The Baroque Cycle is one of the best voice performances I've heard.

Having said that, some fairly small scale audiobooks that have the authors narrating them are also very good as you can hear the interest and the passion of the author in their subject:

e.g.

https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Wilding-Audiobook/B07DDMZ16R

https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Exactly-Audiobook/B07CQ3RPKC

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