Comment by ivansavz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivansavz | Hacker News Reader

Or you could use the command `say` on the command line on any current mac to get good-enough text-to-speech.

See full script here: https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/de3ccb244224d101bb93320... and this doc explains how you can setup a keyboard shortcut to turn any text selection into an audio book https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...

Here is a sample if you want to hear what it sounds like: https://minireference.com/static/tmp/constructive_feedback.m...

which is the audio from this blog post https://productivityhub.org/2019/04/19/how-to-deliver-constr...

IMHO, the computer generated voice like Alex (the default voice on mac OS) sounds better because it doesn't try to do inflections or add human character when it is reading. The real-world narrators (voice actors) seem to add too much "character" into their reading, which me distracts from the story/content. The only exception is when the narration is done by the author, in which case I'd consider the narration as part of the work.

I personally find that lack of character and inflections has completely turned me off of audiobooks in favor of podcasting. The typical monotone audio narration causes me to zone out into other thoughts and I find myself rewinding or just turning it off.

I've experienced that too, but only for "bad writing."

I'm normally able to follow narrative (both fiction and non-fiction) that has something to teach, and also enjoying listening to classic literature no problem...

But sometimes I'm reading a long article from the internet and I experience what you describe (losing track of what author is saying, having to rewind to get the point). After a while, I realize it's not the computer's fault, but the article is just very low content (e.g. some authors just pile on words, emotions, opinions without a coherent narrative or point). Recently I noticed I'm able to detect GPT-generated text this way too... words without content or message.

Perhaps the monotone TTS can be a test for the "meaning" contents of a text.

If you're still interested, give graphic audio a try. They're full-cast (usually a different reader for each character) high production quality audiobooks. They cost accordingly too though.

https://www.graphicaudio.net/

TIL. This is an interesting capability of the command line. Have any more fun ones? (at least fun to a CL noob)

Here is another script `getmp3.sh` that you can use to download .mp3 file from any youtube music video:

   #!/usr/bin/env bash
   echo "Downloading mp3 from $1"
   yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 "$1"

You'll need to install https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#installation before you can use that. As you can see, the "script" is just so to add a options `-x` (extract audio) and `--audio-format mp3` to convert to mp3 in the end.

I haven't figured out how to effectively search my HN favorites, else I'd probably be able to find a few more of these, but this was discussed recently:

https://git.herrbischoff.com/awesome-macos-command-line/abou...

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