New 80,000 Hours feature: Listen to audio versions of our podcast transcripts

By Bella, 80000_Hours @ 2023-04-01T05:46 (+192)

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new feature on the 80,000 Hours website: as of today, you can now listen to state-of-the-art text-to-speech audio versions of all of our podcast transcripts!

We're including the entire 146-episode back catalogue at launch — that's over 300 hours of listening material for our audience to enjoy whenever they choose.

We hope that this new feature can bring our podcast transcripts to an all new audience of audiophiles and those who prefer listening to content rather than reading it. 

And since it also works on mobile, you can now listen to our podcast transcripts while doing the dishes, walking the dog, or on your daily commute!

I'm really excited about this inititative making our podcast transcripts more widely accessible, and helping spread important ideas about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.

Feel free to ask any questions about our new feature in the comments.

David Johnston @ 2023-04-01T06:15 (+82)

When I read your scripts and Rob is interviewing, I like to read Rob’s questions at twice the speed of the interviewees’ responses. Can you accommodate that with your audio version?

Robert_Wiblin @ 2023-04-04T19:21 (+10)

Thanks for the suggestion David! We're discussing adding this as a premium feature — perhaps activated only for Giving What We Can members.

Luke Freeman @ 2023-04-01T07:25 (+33)

I listen at 5x speed and I’d find it much easier if you could add some filler words (like “um”, “ah”, “like”, “you know”) into the audio versions of the transcripts. This would aid with comprehension.

This would would make the difference between me bothering to listen and being compelled to trash it on twitter.

Thanks so much for all you do! Very much appreciate it 😀

Jeremy @ 2023-04-01T15:14 (+32)

If you like, I have some extra bandwidth this week and could transcribe some of them.

Luke Freeman @ 2023-04-01T11:21 (+19)

Is it possible to first translate it to Latin and then back to English? I do this with the text versions of the podcast transcripts and find that it improves the quality of reasoning of the host in particular.

David Mears @ 2023-04-01T10:22 (+17)

We love to see / hear it!

Can you confirm that you will be using text-to-audio AI voices that have been trained on Rob's actual voice and the other guests' and hosts' voices? Kelsey Piper's new blog, Planned Obsolescence, does this, and it works very well (with a delicious undertone of uncanny valley). I think it would be great for authenticity, and strengthening the parasocial bond between audience and creator.

If this proves too costly, I would suggest it's still worth just getting the hosts and guests to read out the transcripts themselves, because the benefits of voice authenticity are hard to overstate.

Dawn Drescher @ 2023-04-01T17:45 (+11)

Oh god, I’ve done this unironically when the difference in speed was too great between the speakers. Otherwise I would’ve had to listen to it at 1.5x or switch back and forth all the time. xD

NicholasKross @ 2023-04-01T16:17 (+7)

This is interesting, but I'm not sure I'll have the time to listen to it. Maybe make transcripts of these audio versions?

Bill @ 2023-04-01T11:08 (+6)

Thanks Bella.

I'm just wondering, would there be an audio description feature to make it feel more alive? Eg: If t he script calls for [manic laughter], will this be replicated or will it only be read aloud as such?

 

Many thanks

Bill

Nathan Young @ 2023-04-02T22:55 (+2)

Someone says they'd actual use it!

Excuse the typos, I'll vouch for Tripp.