Let's Try Something New: Very Early Access (Patreon)

Something I like to do during my writing process now is once I get to a certain point in a script, I have a text-to-speech plugin for my browser called Read Aloud that I use to listen to my text in someone else's voice.

The funny thing about Read Aloud is that it actually lets you use Google's premium WaveNet TTS, which normally requires you to login to a Google Cloud account and pay $16 per million words. However, using a trick with the Google Cloud demo, Read Aloud can use WaveNet voices to read probably up to around 7500 words for free on either a per month or per week basis (I forget). Which, at least for the types of reading I do on the internet, is usually enough for a handful of articles outside of the really long marathon level stuff.

But it's most useful here, when I want to get a sense of what a script sounds like when it's read out loud. It can help shake me out of bad habits early and spotlight when wording sounds too dense.

So... why not share that with you guys? Here is THE most first-draft-look at that Bubsy video I mentioned in the previous post. There ARE typos. There IS bad grammar. The script WILL change, possibly quite dramatically, before the final video. This is the TTS reading it back to me for the first time so I can identify and fix errors easier.

Because of that, two disclaimers:

• This is TTS, so it occasionally pronounces one or two things a little weird. That's part of the fun. When it says "Florida Studio"? That's FL Studio, the audio editing program.

• Around 85% of this is voiced by "Google Standard English Daniel", one of their premium WaveNet voices. Unfortunately the script was so long that I used up all my WaveNet time for this session, so the last 15% is read by the free "Google Translate UK English Male" voice, which means the voice switches from an American accent to a British accent and the quality of the voice itself shifts a little bit. It happens around the 48 minute mark and lasts for the last ten minutes, give or take.

I did also go through this and try to punch it up ever so slightly -- I sometimes write scene direction in my script, so I tried to replicate that here, with proper cut-ins for sounds and quotes and stuff. Outside of this being a weird robot voice thing, it's actually as close to sounding like a proper "podcast" as I could get it.

Assuming this isn't so ghetto it turns everybody off, this could be something I do for more videos going forward.