FAQ

1. Why books specifically?

   We read a lot and have found that there is a gap not being filled by current options on the market. Every non-AI audiobook service always has at least one glaring issue. Many don't have a long enough tail (ie. some books aren't available). Others cost $20 per book which feels like too much if you have already purchased a physical or ebook version and/or read a lot. Finally, they usually don't let you view the text while it reads, which can be annoying if there is a section or word you don't understand.

   With AI solutions, you get a cheaper service but we have found they do not handle books well. Books, in particular, have a lot of specific quirks that need to be addressed: when and for how long the narrator should pause between sections, whether or not footnotes should be read, how lists should be read, how images should be handled, etc. When these sorts of things are not accounted for, the listening experience often becomes very confusing. We believe they can be solved, but it requires prioritizing books rather than all TTS.

2. How are you different from other services?

   We will focus on maximizing the listening experience for books specifically. To see why this matters, take a look at our answer to question 1.

3. What are the main features going to be?

   We want to provide a complete experience akin to other audiobook or TTS services. This means the basic play/pause/skipping options, flexible speed control, options around whether stuff like citations or footnotes are read, options for displaying text to your screen, sleep timer, downloading audio so you can listen without a connection, and so forth.

   If you have any other specific features you would like to see, we would love to hear about them!

4. What will pricing look like?

   We aren't 100% sure yet, but based on our current costs we can project a little bit. We also aim to have a few options. For people who only want an occasional book, we will provide an option for purchasing a single book for less than $5. We will also offer a monthly subscription that allows you to convert any number of books for less than $10 per month.

   It is possible we will eventually have a freemium model, but that will require us to first flesh out some more details.

5. What is your planned release date (or timeline)?

   It is not set in stone yet, but we plan to have an initial beta release at least by the end of this year. If you would like to stay up to date, enter your email on our main page and select the option to be notified for major milestones.

6. How many voice options will there be?

   We believe it is more important to have fewer voice options if it means that the ones we do have are higher quality. As such, we will focus on fewer voices initially -- possibly only one or two. Eventually, we may or may not scale this up.

   Note that the demo is trained on the voice of Alex, one of our co-founders. He is not a professionally trained narrator and will likely not be the voice for our final product. On that note, please let us know if you or anyone you know is a professional and would be interested in working with us!

7. What AI models are you using?

   We are using Sesame's open source model as a starting point and fine-tuning/modifying it from there to suit our needs. We also have some proprietary software.