I Tried a Standard Book-to-Audiobook Converter App. Eleven Labs’ Free AI Is Impressive

Spending a lot of time reading each evening is one of those pleasures that’s hard to describe, especially when you spend a significant portion of your day in front of a screen. However, if you’re honest with yourself, you don’t always have the desire, energy, or focus for a good day of reading.

Audiobooks have been around for a long time as an alternative. In fact, it’s one of the major growth markets. The problem? Not all books have an audiobook version, and at least the tools I’ve found so far only robotically and artificially retell the text we provide.

Eleven Labs wanted to get down to business. The company launched an app that can read articles in PDF, ePub, or any other text format. You select any of the voices included in the app (some are Spanish), and suddenly our book becomes an audiobook.

The app is called Eleven Reader: AI Audio and is available for free on iOS and Android. Yes, it requires registration to use. The developers tell us that they plan to release some premium features, but “for now” these features are completely free. In other words, Let’s take advantage before the party is paid for.

The application works brutally, as it not only allows you to upload text files in ePUB and PDF formats, but also allows you to import links and even scanned images. We can also copy and paste any text.

In the playback section, we can play the newly converted audiobook with the screen locked or read it while it is being narrated to us. The application differentiates chapters, so we can immediately jump to the one we need. Likewise, we can play content at 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x and 2x speed.

The key to the app is naturalness. It’s not perfect and doesn’t perfectly imitate the natural intonation of the human voice in the best audiobooks, but it’s a far cry from that awful sound. The Loquendo Effect other text-to-speech tools suffer from this. In my case, I chose the “Sarah Martin” voice and am quite happy with the result.

Image | Hataka

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