7 Comments

I googled (as I have before) to figure out how to enable text-to-speech because they just included it again in their On Substack post. I arrived at your post. It's good to know there is nothing I can manually do to enable it. My posts still do not have it and yet the majority of those that I read have it enabled. I wish I could know why I am in the minority.

Expand full comment
author

I was really hoping after I saw Jasmine’s post that we all can have automated voiceovers now. Still not, I guess 🙁 It would be Really Good for Substack to fix this inequity.

Expand full comment
author

Cheryl, I was also hoping that ElevenLabs starter plan would be an ethical way to use AI to solve this. (Related article) But they just came out with an AI music feature that seems not to be ethical. So they are off my ethical shoestring tool list.

Have you experimented with recording manual voiceovers or using any AI tools?

Expand full comment
author

It's been 2.5 weeks; no word yet on being allowed into the beta program for automated voiceovers. So far I've manually recorded 4 post voiceovers for a total of about 32 minutes. The recording process wasn't as painful and repetitive as I feared. The audio time runs about 50-100% longer than the estimated reading time. I'm not sure yet where to see in the post metrics whether anyone has played the audio.

Expand full comment
author

I found one publication that appears to have automatic Text To Speech enabled: it’s audible on this insightful Mother’s Day post - https://open.substack.com/pub/toooldforthis/p/my-mothers-death-was-the-best-thing?r=3ht54r

Expand full comment

I am exploring how to add to my regular weekly productivity process to record my own (reading them outloud)

Expand full comment