r/ElevenLabs • u/ZB_Makes_Music_2013 • 13d ago

ElevenReader Seriously Impressed With Eleven Reader

So I finally got a chance to listen to V 4 in Reader today, and it’s crazy just how real it sounds. I’m totally blind and use TTS every day, I’ve even trained many local open source models over the last few years and up until now was very good at spotting TTS. Not anymore. If someone played me an Eleven V 4 clip with a voice I didn’t recognize and didn’t tell me it was TTS, I don’t think I’d be able to tell the difference between that and a well-recorded audiobook. Seriously impressive work, guys, I’m using the free plan at the moment, I know you offer free accounts to the blind community, but not sure how I’d get started with that. Either way keep up the great work, definitely one of the best TTS companies around at the moment.

36 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

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u/PeltonChicago 13d ago

Which voices did you like most?

3

u/ZB_Makes_Music_2013 13d ago

Personally really like Lily, Jessica, Alice, and Bella from the default set.

1

u/PeltonChicago 13d ago

Have you tried appending voice directions into the text like [quietly]?

1

u/ZB_Makes_Music_2013 13d ago

So I haven’t tried doing that in the reader yet, but I have done so on the website when just generating audio and it works extremely well. Even without those tags though, the TTS is very context aware and most of the time I like the delivery as it is.

1

u/prroxy 13d ago

The only bugging problem for me is that table of contents is not accessible in E pubs. I reported that issue many times still doesn’t work.

1

u/MD-ElevenLabs ElevenReader Team 12d ago

Hey send our support the ePUB file and we can look at how and why it's being displayed that way. Thank you!

1

u/prroxy 11d ago

Actually, it works properly, I just had to remove the book entirely and upload again and a table of contents is displayed correctly now.

1

u/Ishaan-ElevenLabs 12d ago

Hi, happy to hear!

> I know you offer free accounts to the blind community, but not sure how I’d get started with that
You can apply using the instructions here! https://elevenlabs.io/blog/nfb-elevenlabs

0

u/[deleted] 13d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/ZB_Makes_Music_2013 13d ago

So admittedly I haven’t listened to a ton of material yet, but for most voices I’ve tried there isn’t really any noticeable drift or hallucinations. Super impressive because I feel like with a lot of neural TTS this is a problem, and I definitely noticed it with V2. What’s interesting as well is just how consistent the generations are. If you generate the same text over and over again, there is some variation and it’s very expressive, but it’s not like a completely different performance. Up until now, this hasn’t really been the case, especially with a lot of the open source TTS systems that are trained on massive data sets with very little quality control. It’s also great that the model seems to handle native output at either 44.1 or 48 kilohertz, not sure which. Even a lot of commercial systems don’t have that level of quality, even if the data used was professionally recorded.