[ the article is a tts test ]
listen to the article..
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since i published the intro to my travel stories under my own name you know about the intention to publish my stories incognito.
it would have been difficult to tell the stories incognito - many parts of the stories would had to be scrapped to hide my identity.
the story telling under my own name is simple, but now i need to scrap some happenings in my life from public knowledge because it may reveal the identities of some people.
not that i have something in my past that i need to hide, but i don't wish to put into difficult situations the people who may be recognized in the stories. for example people who helped me escape from discrimination by government, but also those who are just good people and may be harrassed if i will tell about some happenings with really bad people involved.
so, about the story voice.
having initially made lots of tests with modifying my own voice electronically, i realized that there are methods to undo the sound filters to get the original voice back, which means that using voice modifiers isn't very safe.
another option to tell stories incognito is the text to speech playback. it's safe to use for hiding identity. there are millions of people using similar or even exactly the same text to speech technologies, but the downside is unnatural voice which can be difficult to follow.
also it would require rewriting the stories many times, to listen the talking robot over and over again and to make modifications to the parts in text where the robot is reading too bad to understand.
i did tests after tests after tests, and the solution became obvious -- to tell the stories with my own voice is the best solution, not to put off listeners.
telling stories with my own voice and not hiding my identity is not an issue though, because my life has been interesting enough, thus skipping some of the stories which i planned to tell will not affect the whole picture too much.
after the tests of the platforms where to publish the stories i feel like i'm finally ready to tell the stories from my life in a more continuous manner than i did it so far.
i must admit that during testing of the publishing platforms i used some recordings which were made not by me, selected from well known sources.
it was a necessity.
why?
because many of the popular publishing platforms are applying high censorship.
thus, i purposefully posted several stories not of my own recording in the beginning of testing of the publishing platforms, to see what happens.
now i'm confident enough to have selected the most tolerant platforms to post my own material.
obviously i only tested free platforms, the reasons for which you can figure out from my previous stories already.
there's more to follow.
how soon i will begin posting stories regularly depends on my possibilities to record. i am way too often in a noisy environment and this is also a reason why i am testing now the text to speech option one more time.
you never know, maybe due to the life situation i will find myself in, i will need to resort to telling the stories with a robot speaking my written text.
as of today i have selected for testing over a hundred text to speech services, to find the best one for my needs.
in the past i have already tested tens of the best known tts services and i wasn't satisfied with the results, thus i dropped the tts option from my choice, but now i will try again. the life of a perfectionist isn't easy.
all the best to anyone who has read or listened till the end of this article.
have a good time.
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