Announcement: AI Narrations Available for All New LessWrong Posts

Awesome! My dyslexic friend may finally get to listen to my writing :)

A few suggestions for improvement:

1. Auto-start the narration when the speaker icon is clicked
2. Let the user set a default speed in the user settings, or alternatively, remember which speed the user used last and apply it next time they listen to a post.
3. Add the speaker button to posts previews in recent discussion
4. Have a hovering mini-player on the side so you can easily pause, play, rewind, forward, increase or decrease speed from anywhere in the page.
5. Have a visual indicator on the audio timeline to show you where section headings are are so you can jump to them like you can with the table of contents.

Feedback on this specific audio narration, and the feature in general: (I've also submitted this via the Feedback button.)

• At 0:44, there's a line "That's the end of that list", which is not in the written text. Maybe there's some logic here which assumes that a colon is followed by a bunch of bullet points? In this case, there was no list (zero bullet points), and so the line "That's the end of that list" makes no sense. And besides, there never was a corresponding preceding line à la "Here's a list of bullet points".
• At 0:52, there's a narration line "Here's a list of bullet points. Podcast feeds.". Here, there is a list of bullet points, but the narration line is inserted before the subheading of "Podcast feeds", rather than where it's supposed to be in the audio, namely afterwards.
• At 1:19, the narration says "will continue narrating selected curated posts for now.", but the text says "will continue narrating most curated posts for now.". Presumably the text has been edited after the audio was generated. If the audio can get out of sync with the text, that's a conundrum that has to be solved somehow. Generating new audio for every edit is presumably prohibitively expensive. Although this would by no means be sufficient, the audio must at least indicate somehow that it's out of date with the post. But then we're still left with the problem where you might listen to the audio of an essay which has since been edited to say "I've changed my mind; everything I said here is wrong".

I really like the way it handles headlines and bullet point lists!

In an ideal world I'd like the voice to sound less robotic. Something like https://elevenlabs.io/ or https://www.descript.com/overdub.  How much I enjoy listening to text-to-speech content depends a lot on how grating I find the voice after long periods of listening.

Does the narration re-do when posts get edited?

This is really great, ty c:
Will it eventually be expanded to earlier posts? 

I forgot to say this in my previous comment, but nowadays I prefer to listen to nonfiction articles (via TTS) rather than reading them. So I listen to a ton of TTS stuff and thus very much appreciate any work that makes the experience of listening to TTS easier or higher quality.

This is really great. As someone with pretty bad uncorrectable and constantly declining vision, a lot of my "reading" is listening. Lately I've often been thinking "Why can't I easily listen to everything I find on the internet yet?". When I tried to just use an existing service to convert things myself, I ran into a lot of the problems that the improvements listed here seem to solve.

It seems to act funny when there's a code block in the post. See GPT-2's positional embedding matrix is a helix [LW · GW] for example

If you are looking for any support on a more naturalistic version of those posts that make it to the podcast feed, I have been experimenting heavily and producing an ElevenLabs AI podcast of Yudkowsky's latest fiction. I have an API pipeline already built, and could assist in producing a test episode or two. 

Great new feature. Thank you! I will probably make use of this over the next few weeks.

But I did get a laugh out of "Specialist terminology, acronyms and idioms are handled gracefully" immediately being followed by a mispronunciation of "latex."

Maybe somewhat unrelated, but does anyone know if there's been an effort to narrate HP:MoR using AI? I have several friends that I think could really stand to enjoy it, but who can't get past the current audiobook narration. I mostly agree with them, although it's better on 1.5x.