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Comment by grozzle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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