Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcement: AI Narrations Available for All New LessWrong Posts, published by Solenoid Entity on July 20, 2023 on LessWrong.

TYPE III AUDIO is running an experiment with the LessWrong team to provide automatic AI narrations on all new posts. All new LessWrong posts will be available as AI narrations (for the next few weeks).

You might have noticed the same feature recently on the EA Forum, where it is now an ongoing feature. Users there have provided excellent feedback and suggestions so far, and your feedback on this pilot will allow further improvements.

How to Access:

On Post Pages:

Click the speaker icon to listen to the AI narration.

Podcast Feeds:

The existing "LessWrong Curated" podcast feed will host Curated posts and those with over 125 karma.

The new "LessWrong (All Audio)" feed features all posts with over 30 karma. (Spotify), (Apple Podcasts) (RSS/Other)

Perrin Walker (AKA Solenoid Entity) of TYPE III AUDIO will continue narrating selected curated posts for now.

Send us your feedback.

Please send us your feedback! This is an experiment, and the software is improved and updated daily based on user feedback.

You could share what you find most useful, what's annoying, bugged or difficult to understand, how this compares to human narration, and what additional features you'd like to see.

For comments on a specific narration, use the feedback button on the audio player or visit t3a.is.

For general feedback or suggestions, please comment on this post or email us at [email protected].

Writers interested in having their work narrated or requesting a particular narration, please contact [email protected].

Is this just text-to-speech on posts?

It's an improvement on that.

We spoke with the Nonlinear Library team about their listeners' most-requested upgrades, and we hope our AI narrations will be clearer and more engaging than unimproved TTS. Some specific improvements:

Audio notes to indicate headings, lists, images, etc.

Image alt-text is narrated.

Specialist terminology, acronyms and idioms are handled gracefully. Footnotes too.

LaTeX math notation handled gracefully in all cases and narrated in some simple cases.

We skip reading out long URLs, academic citations, and other things that you probably don't want to listen to.

Episode descriptions include a link to the original post. According to Nonlinear, this is their most common feature request!

More podcast feed options.

We'd like to thank Kat Woods and the team at Nonlinear Library for their work, and for giving us helpful advice on this project.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.