Hey everyone,
I’m trying to listen to EPUB books at ~400 WPM (or faster) using free, offline (if possible) TTS on my current Android phone.
I used to love Moon+ Reader paired with old Ivona TTS voices (they handled high speeds really well without distorting), but on my new Android phone, I can’t install Ivona voices anymore due to compatibility.
Google’s default TTS works, but cranking the speed slider past 25 on Moon+ Reader makes the pitch rise weirdly and comprehension drops hard. I’ve also tried SherpaTTS Piper / Coqui models, but they have noticeable delays generating each sentence, so at high speeds the pauses feel way too long and break the flow.
What would you recommend for listening to ebooks on Android at high speed?
I don’t have an answer, I just want to say I’m quite impressed that your brain can seemingly process a high volume of information at the sustained speed of Eminem’s famous Rap God verse.
It often doesn’t really. It misses a ton and fills in the gaps itself. It is aimilar with multitasking in that it is really just fast task switching and filling the gaps.
I maan, there are dedinitely people that specifically train to speed read or listen, but i would be interested to have people speed read/listen short novels or so and check for comprehension after the fact.
Remember that people are bell-curve shaped, right?
Just because normal people can do some something at some specific speed, doesn’t mean that that limit holds for ALL people.
There are people who can read a page at a glance, with full comprehension.
Not many, but they aren’t prohibited by universe, they are prohibited by our assumption.
My fave example is Feynman.
In Glieck’s book “Genius”, there is some normal physicist who spent 1/2-year ( 365/2-days ) working-out a theory, & then presented it in a lecture, at a gathering.
Feynman wasn’t a witness of that lecture.
He heard about it, later, & that night he worked-through the same theory ( 1/2-days ), then in the morning, went hunting the physicist-in-question, finding him, he demanded “is that what you got??”
The poor guy was horrified: in 1/365 of the time it had taken him to do it, Feynman had taken the theory further then he had.
The other’s in Mlodinow’s book about Feynman mentoring him.
He & another worked-out some quantum-optics stuff, again in 1/2y, but it contradicted the established work.
In 1/2-hour, Feynman got enough understanding of it, that he told them to publish, because they aren’t making any mistakes, & that meant, to him, that the established stuff was probably wrong.
It was.
You can’t compete against everybody, if you’re normal.
The book “Barking Up The Wrong Tree” ( author: Barker ) is entirely on this principle that we’re getting wrong.
Whole-society-wide wrong.
The truly-exceptional are different from the normal.
& that’s just how diversity works…
Life’s neater, this way, to me…
_ /\ _
Linking to my recent review of Anx Reader.
Have you tried installing the voices through adb?
I have some apps that aren’t compatible with the usual installation workflow but they install and work well with adb based installation. Worth a try
After connecting the device through adb, run.
adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block app.apkHmmm. What about converting epubs to audio files and then speeding them up? You could do this process on a computer, or probably in termux on the android device.
…why?
Try RHvoice from fdroid
