So, today I spent a whole bunch of time making Text To Speech versions of many of the articles. So far there’s now audio versions of About Me, My Story, My Human Cost, The Advert and The Staff Reviews, with more to follow!
I’m aware there’s a certain amount of lag when loading the player. I know how to fix this, but I haven’t yet implemented it (for the technically curious, it’s called ‘waveform caching’, and I’m going to try and implement that later today).
For pages where it seems relevant to differentiate between voices, I’ve chosen different voices for effect. I hope you enjoy this new feature and find these useful! 💝
Edit: And… done! I’ve fixed the load-in pop, more tightly integrated the player and optimised the filesizes so they don’t burn through data. They should only load metadata without playback, so shouldn’t increase page-load times unnecessarily (but that caused enough of a headache, I didn’t want to throw 2MB of audio at people that might never play it. Sometimes internet is expensive!).
All in all 7.2MB for 35 minutes of audio at a decent enough quality for speech. Opus is really a nice lossy compression format. I’ll get the rest of the pages done at some point 🙂