Relational Power v1.21 was released today to all channels (Amazon, Gumroad, Web and Audiobook/Podcast). The notice was sent to this Circling Guide Newsletter with 1200 subscribers.
This release is a minor release in terms of the content, but a major release in terms of the audiobook. The previous audiobook version was okay in terms of the voice, but buggy in terms of the pauses.
A story here, in case you are interested
I spent close to a week researching the various text-to-speech services. The problem was finding one which had a human-like voice, wasn’t too pricey, could be programmed for pauses, and could take an SSML document as input containing the pauses.
You would think that would be a straightforward requirement, right? Well apparently not. It needed SSML input because I needed an automated process to produce an audiobook for each new release. Meaning the master document (which is currently kept as a Google doc) needed to be directly input into the speech engine, after breaking it into chapters.
I finally settled on Microsoft Azure. This is a cloud service similar to Amazon Web Services. It took almost an hour to figure out how to pay them (LOL), and then most of the day fighting with their SSLM input function to get it to work with Word. Finally succeeded.
If you are an author and need similar help with this, ping me. It costs me under $10 now to generate an audiobook (Natural Reader Commercial, closest competitor, was $100/mth).
Hope you enjoy the new Audiobook. The voice is “Tony” and it does the job. Especially with fine-tuning of the breaks.
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