Transcription
Hi, my name is Helena. I'm a German creative who moved to Silicon Valley. I am an artist and also an AI enthusiast. This video is going to be about an app that really helps me with reading because I often don't finish books, or I don't carry my physical copies with me when I travel. Reading on computer screens is really tiring, to be honest.
So, this new app, called 11 Reader, is really helping me out. What it can do, essentially, is read every book to you that you own as an EPUB, a PDF, or any other common ebook format. For example, in my case, there are books that I love that don't have an audiobook version, so they're not as accessible to me. I'm less likely to finish them, but with this app, I can add the media that I bought or even the media that I wrote, like a PDF, for example, that I want to read out to myself again and listen to it.
Actually, it offers any voice that is within the app, and it doesn't sound robotic. It could be, for example, a female British accent or an American accent, and I have the choice to pick the voice that I want for the content. For example, for "Mind Magic" by James Otti, I own the physical copy and a digital copy, but it's just been too tiresome to read it while I'm traveling.
So, what it does here is preload the content. I'm just going to put this on sound and read it: "Once we get the hang of being okay in the present moment, we can cultivate self-compassion—the inner critic's kryptonite." This is from Chapter Five of "Mind Magic" by James Otti, but you get the idea. It's in here; I can read it out to myself, and with headphones, I can do a number of other things. As long as I can still listen, I'm free to do whatever I want with my hands, and that actually helps me stay engaged with the content.
I used to do that when I was in school. I used to listen to the teachers and actually draw them while they were speaking or draw the content that they were teaching, whether it was math, French, or whatnot. So, this is really helpful for people who are visual thinkers. It is helpful for people who want to re-engage with content they've written themselves, for example, for writers or people who want to listen to their own journal if they have a digital version of it and just kind of get back into the field of thought they were in at the time and reconnect.
It's very helpful for people who have vision impairments. I can't believe that essentially any book that has ever been written, including classics that are now not copyrighted anymore, is perfectly available at our fingertips to listen to, and that's just absolutely incredible to me.
I'm familiar with 11 Labs from another project that I've done, where I created a voice twin of myself and then had that voice read out actually accent-free English to me. "Hi, I am Helena's digital avatar. Helena created me from a prompt with the help of DALL-E and then hand-painted my face as a digital painting to look similar to her without being a copy." That was pretty amazing.
So, 11 Labs also has, I think, fairly good privacy settings. I felt comfortable uploading my voice twin there, and it's my understanding that you could read content out to yourself with your own voice twin. Or you could, for example, use it to read out or to transcribe—reverse transcribe—any kind of story. For example, if you have kids, you could listen to science content. If you have to consume papers, depending on what it is, if it has difficult words in it or, I don't know, mathematical equations, it might not be able to do that. But anything else that's readable could be read to you with 11 Labs, and you could essentially consume more intentionally and in a short amount of time, possibly with more engagement.
If you're like me and you need to keep your hands busy to be able to listen well, the app has more features that I haven't tried yet. For example, there's a podcast feature that I will explore in the future, where you can have content reimagined as a personalized podcast. I think that's pretty fascinating. So, curated content is going to evolve into personalized curated content with AI.
Obviously, I don't know about the quality yet, but I like the idea that I can engage with content in a new way and in the way I want. It's essentially a learning revolution, an accessibility revolution. It's free, so it's a free tool that anybody can use, and you can even use trademarked voices within the app, so humans who are famous, for example, actors. I believe John Wayne is one of the trademarked voices.
Something interesting is happening there, where personal likenesses of people—the way we look, the way we sound—are going to be trademarked. That also leads us into another area of this AI kind of paradigm shift, which is where parts of us as humans, or all of us, maybe even to a degree except for our being alive, can be reproduced. A lot of things are going to happen, but just in terms of being able to access more content, and of course, we need to think about copyrights, about artist rights, and all of these things. So, I'm not encouraging you to steal, just saying.
But on the other hand, imagine all of the things that would never be an audiobook that you can now access—literally anything. So, I'm stoked, and I haven't even tried all of the features of this app. I would encourage you to upload a PDF or an EPUB of a book you own and just give it a try and see if it helps you.
That has been it for today. Hoping to see you in my next video, either about creativity, consciousness, or AI. Bye!