For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM.
It's definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive's scanned book's OCR -> TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be professionally narrated
And for anyone who listens to a lot of audio, I'd look into using an audio equalizer. Pulling down the high frequencies (especially for some woman narrators) makes it more comfortable after many hours of listening. On android the "Smart audiobook" app has this and it's really nice. Maybe some headphones/android phones can do this globally
> And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks.
I've listened to numerous books (mostly but not exclusively fiction) using TTS and I'd like to confirm this experience. It's kind of remarkable, once I became accustomed to the sound of the TTS program the weirdness just sort of evaporated and I was left with an experience that feels very similar to reading visually.
Voice Dream Reader is also very good on the iPhone. It can use any of the apple voices (download high quality versions in accessibility settings), and has other voices available. It can OCR pdf files that are otherwise inaccessible. It also makes a great audio book player.
More to the point, I’ve had trouble using Siri to speak in certain titles in iBooks on iOS. It would drop words or entire sentences or paragraphs. It was unusable for those titles. Not sure if it was bad OCR on the source file or what. I haven’t tried it on titles purchased from Apple, so I can’t speak to that.
I've been playing around with the IBM TTS for audiozing research papers. I think that research should be more accessible and I think that the audioform is the way forward.
The comprehension of powerful ideas should be easy, effortless and intuitive. Listening to content has the double benefit of ensuring that talking about complex subjects is all the more familiar. If you've been introduced to a topic through speech, talking about it is all the more natural.
Thanks for promoting TTS. I’ve listened to many books, fiction and non-, on Android using Google TTS and it felt like half-baked masa cakes; good enough to eat, but even better once fully cooked. One of the ebook readers I used (available on F-Droid, included pitch change) allowed for custom spellings of strings, though “sat” being read as “Saturday”, and “Dr” as “drive”, were difficult to fix so I relied on context.
On iOS I’m happy to learn about Speech Options from a child comment.
I've listened to enough TTS for non-fiction that it doesn't really bother me. In fact, I sometimes prefer the TTS over a low-quality narrator. TTS for fiction less so.
my problem with non-fiction TTS (or at least the non-fiction I read) is it often involves diagrams or figures and that really doesn't work with TTS, sadly. But histories are nice
In my experience, it works pretty well nonfiction that has a narrative structure, like histories, but doesn't work as well for more technical books, like those about programming languages.
It's definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive's scanned book's OCR -> TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be professionally narrated
And for anyone who listens to a lot of audio, I'd look into using an audio equalizer. Pulling down the high frequencies (especially for some woman narrators) makes it more comfortable after many hours of listening. On android the "Smart audiobook" app has this and it's really nice. Maybe some headphones/android phones can do this globally