The story looks brilliant.

_Almost_ brilliant enough to ignore the accent of Evgeny Morozov.

Any chance he is open to having a version dubbed by a native english speaker?

I love it that the creator is also the narrator, but...people are busy.

I know that is harsh feedback but it's the truth--there are voice actors for a reason and this content is too great not to have it spoken by native speakers in many languages. It's great to have the option to hear it from the creator, but for faster consumption would be great to have a native option as well.

I realize it's "racist" but are voice-to-voice AIs a thing yet?

It could very quickly become racist, but it isn't necessarily. The Masters of Scale podcast recently did a nice episode on using a voice clone of Reid Hoffman to help with various dubs and edits: https://mastersofscale.com/meet-reid-ish-the-story-of-clonin...

There's a segment where the various staff/producers all try to imitate Reid's style, and then apply the voice transfer model to here their impression in his voice.

I've also used an open source TTS model conditioned on an actor whose voice I like to read the transcript from a podcast host whose voice I have a hard time tolerating. Here's where you start to edge closer to possible racism, echo chambering, etc. It's certainly a gray area, and I haven't navigated the moral shoals and reefs of replacing one voice with another* I like more – which is why I won't publish anything about how I did it.

(*A random sample: Better to not listen to what a person has to say, or to listen to your voice-cloned version of their words? What about if you literally can't understand them? Non-native speakers already rewrite their words using ChatGPT. Possibly (likely) only okay if they do it themselves...)

They are a thing

> _Almost_ brilliant enough to ignore the accent of Evgeny Morozov.

Do you have any particular issue understanding his accent? Is it distracting? I know this criticism and I've held it with respect to other podcasts (or for less: just bad microphones or engineering making listening grating).

But... he's perfectly fluent in English, I have no trouble understanding him, and I don't find his accent distracting either. The engineering on the audio is good as well. Not sure what the problem is here.

Click "Watch the Trailer"

Set it to 2x speed.

Feed the audio to a voice-to-text engine.

See the accuracy difference between when he is speaking vs his subjects.

Why would I do that? I don't care about how accurate a STT engine is on his voice? Seems like an artificial benchmark.

All that teaches me is that my auditory system is still far superior to SotA in STT, which... isn't surprising?

If anything, your benchmark seems more like an indictment of how such STT engines have been trained (bias in training data, etc).

> Why would I do that?

I told you that I found him hard to understand. You disagreed.

I suggested one way to get an objective measurement.

Maybe there's some web app that auto-grades this sort of thing? Like a Grammarly but for audio quality?

I'm not sure. It's an interesting idea.

That's not an objective measurement of how easy he is to understand for humans.

That's a predictive score from a model trained on some set of audio recordings of how likely it would be for it to have produced that audio.

This can only possibly be construed as a "measurement" with respect to the model. It's a measure of how the model relates to the input. I'd claim that's not a good proxy for human comprehension at all.

In text, it works a good bit better as text data and grammar are far less rich than speech with intonation, accent, cadence, etc.

Sorta feels a bit like Atom Curtis' "All watched over by machines of lovin grace"

I first saw it over here on thoughtmaybe https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...

Probably my favorite of his series. I especially enjoy the way episode on the abuse of vegetative metaphors. Abuse of "natural" metaphors in technology obscure a lot.

P.S. I got a chuckle out of "Atom Curtis".