playing around with text-to-speech

whenever i'm editing a piece that i'm being somewhat-to-very tryhard about, i usually make an effort to read the piece aloud to myself. ideally i'd read the whole thing, slowly, audiobook-style, but more often i'm doing some mix of that + "just muttering passages quietly to myself." it's pretty good for catching the sorts of errors that the brain's too good at "filtering out" while reading (e.g. repeating a word, an awkward dialogue tag, etc).

but, i got curious the other night about the state of text-to-speech software, because hey, that's one of the few domains where "just throw more GPUs at it" does seem pretty useful, and i ran out of podcasts for this week's commute, and yeah i'm absolutely vain enough to make a computer audiobookify my own shit haha.

so, lo, here's the random software i decided to play with after a google search. cursory observations:

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