Play.HT review and getting serious with text to speech

If you’re listening to this and you’re hearing the sound of a slightly old Englishman reading as if he is following his finger along the words on a page, then you are listening to a clone of my voice.

That is one of the latest and rather beautiful things from a company I’ve been using for a couple of years now.

It first started when I revamped this blog, and really, really wanted to do an audio version of every blog post. I had a good search round, and this one was a mix of the best audio and they had the cleanest WordPress integration. it delivered everything I wanted, so I paid a couple of hundred pounds to get the posh version.

Since then, I have been very happy with it. It offers a kind of fidelity and text to audio behaviour that I’ve never met before. Obviously very Artificial Intelligence driven and there are a lot of competitors in this market, but there’s a lot of good tech underneath it.

So we’ll split this review up into the experience and any pluses and minuses.

On the experience side, it’s obviously a very fast moving company. They are keeping themselves cutting edge by adding lots of new features constantly. The text to speech is absolutely phenomenal and more than I could have ever wanted.

Every time I am happy with their service, they bring out a new feature. Which offer enough value so that I’m willing to pay out the money to move up their pricing levels. Currently I’m on their studio Unlimited, which lets me do full conversions with my own voice. Very, very happy with it. And I couldn’t recommend it more.

They have a good website and nice integrations with other platforms (I first found them via a WordPress plugin search), the voices them selves run the full spectrum from stock generic voices all the way to custom clones of your own voice, obviously the pre done voices are far more polished

and sound so close to human that its only the fact they don’t auto adjust to your bad grammar and punctuation that gives them away.

The process of recording and cloning your own voice is an interesting one. and while Play H.T. make the process very easy there are some lessons learnt that I would give to anyone that are trying to clone their voice.

They get you to read out and record a great big chunk of your own text and upload it from which they clone your voice, however once you’ve done that it becomes quite obvious that you have different voices. I have a narration voice as if I was reading a story to somebody, Then I have my chatter voice when I’m talking to another human, or I am on a phone call.

So if I was to add advice, I would read out the type of source material that you are going to generate audio from in this case blog posts, and do a couple of full practice runs before you do your recording, Because your Ums, Ah’s and pauses get incorporated into your speech pattern.

The Good 1

1) Their customer service. I don’t know what they’re paying their customer service chat people, but it’s not enough. Genuine 24 7 service, I pestered them on New Year’s day at about nine in the morning and they answered within 30 seconds. Knowledgeable, consistent, helpful and with the power to make account changes at the financial level.

This has meant that every bad item I have hit they have fixed within 24 hours.

2) You can keep making your voice better by adding extra data to it. obviously this only applies to their clone service and currently you can’t append more audio to an existing voice but you can delete the existing one and reupload it with more data for free.

Which while a bit long winded, works just fine. 2

The Bad

1) Their User Interface consistency. The company on the whole feels very driven by it speech engine, which to be fair is completely as you want it to be, that is their big differential and is the core of their business.

However, I get the slight feeling that they will release a new part to the voice engine or new feature update, and then give the UI people like 30 seconds to adapt to it and jam it out to live. A bit more Quality Assurance guys! and consistency between features would help. things like the WordPress is massively behind the website.

That all needs a bit of polish. It has the feeling of either a very young company or a company where the marketing people have got a death grip on the schedule.

2) Invoicing. Their Invoicing is mad. Again, I think this is driven by the fast movement of their internal processes. They double invoice, they loose track of plans and a feature or 2 will be half accessible.

And while their customer service is absolutely fabulous, has the power to address these things and does so at high speed, it is something that makes you go “Why?”

The Niggles 3

1) Long Paragraphs. While it has a hard limit of 250 words in a paragraph, there is also a soft limit of about 4 Lines, if you go over that it seems to have to glue them together and it near always repeats a few words in the middle.

2) Haunted recordings. Sometimes the Engine has a little moment, like it is listening to a noise in the background, it goes silent. stopping talking while it listens to ghostly voices. then it restarts where it left off.

3) Acronyms. It REALLY hates acronyms, its fine with the common ones like countries and weights, but give it a computer one or a website and it will do a variety of strange things which can be different each time,

I’ve tried spaces, full stops, spaces AND full stops, speech marks everything to get them to behave, but it really sulks with them which is strange, as the previous version of the editor without the voice cloning had no problem at all.

Conclusion

For the text to speech situation generally, services like this will mean that all but the very best audio narrators should be genuinely worried. But for the rest of us this latest revolution really starts to deliver on the promise of computer speech. You still have to put an awful lot of effort into getting a very good human sounding voice, but now at a level that is totally practical to use.

More specifically on Play H.T. They are constantly evolving and improving, and I am very satisfied with them as a platform. Once they get over their slight growing pains and get their consistency sorted they will be perfect.

FootNotes
  1. Other than the audio quality and features already mentioned above.[]
  2. They actually give you a little bit of conflicting information about how much audio they need, so parts of the website say, minimum 10 minutes and then one to two hours for best results, other places say minimum 30 minutes for best results[]
  3. Niggles are issues that the site currently has that either they don’t have in the standard offering or that I am sure they will fix so these may be out of date by the time you read them[]

Oladance Pro: The Perfect headphones for work

I have been an extremely long-time headphone user. I was very very lucky to get one of the very first Walkman’s when they were a gigantic thing that ate batteries, and I’ve worn headphones ever since.

Everything from audio books through concentration music through to terrible, terrible choices in music, I am very, very audio-based.

However, it has only been fairly recently that headphones have been allowed in the majority of office workplaces. Before that, you had to be working in certain areas or with a certain type of person, and even then, if you failed to communicate normally, it would be frowned on and headphones would be blamed.

Now the world has moved on, and most people use them at work to help with concentration and for the never-ending video calls. and they come in lots of different styles and feature sets, but none seem to be totally perfect for the work environment.

But with the Oladance Pro, I think there is a set that actually match and deal with all of the problems of an office environment.

Problem 1: You can’t hear what’s going on in an office with a pair of headphones on.

Any decent pair of headphones will block out your hearing. Recently, there have been bone-conducting headphones, but their audio quality has always been dreadful when I’ve tried them. These ones don’t do that. They seemingly fire the audio in using part of the top of your ear rather than blocking the ear canal. Which means that your actual ear canals are open. Not only does this mean that you can hear everything around you, But it’s obvious that your ears are not plugged or covered, so your work colleagues know they can talk to you and stuff like that.

Problem 2: Small ear buds never have a proper full day of battery 1

These have a true full-day battery life; they last for 16 hours, and they do mean 16 hours. So you can put them on in the morning. Go to work with them. Have them on all day. Go home, take them out, and you won’t have any problems. They also have a nice slim battery case, which makes them easy to carry around and charge.

Problem 3: Bluetooth range and behaviour is very dependent on the chipset in the headphones; poor range and poor connectivity issues still plague headphones after all these years.

These ones have solved the main issues that drive me wild:

  • Range – The range away from audio sources for these are solid, as good as any of the big over-ear headphones, although at extreme range they can get a tiny bit out of sync with each other till you come back closer.
  • Multi Source and Connectivity – being able to connect to 2 sources at once is mandatory in my opinion, especially in a work environment. As well as the ability to swap and recover said connectivity, the Oladance Pro have been improved over the Oladance 2 as they can connect to 2 sources at once, and handle switching between them simply and automatically 2, lastly, they auto-reconnect to the sources when you go fully out of range, which is nice.

Downsides

  • No serious noise isolation: You can’t really use them on a subway, they are much better than any other open headphones and they have a noise cancelling “Zone” mode which does help 3 but it gets overloaded in massively loud places 4.
  • You lose your “Do Not Disturb” mode: because they’re so obviously not in your ears. at work you cannot use them to pretend you can’t hear or are deeply engrossed in something; you have to interact with more humans than you are used too.

And finally, a bit of a big one

  • Don’t throw away the box. This first release is suffering from some serious hardware failure issues. I’m on my 4th pair, with the previous 3 being returned for a variety of reasons, from refusing to charge to a bright red light that means one side won’t talk to another. The company refunded and replaced them with no problem so it’s not a huge issue but I hope they fix it on the second production run.

None work Upside

This one has little to do with work but was too important to not include. A female friend started using the version 2 earphones and pointed out that it meant she could now listen to music when walking her dog at night; normally she can’t as she can’t take the risk of not hearing an attacker approaching, but headphones like these don’t suffer from that problem, a valuable feature.

Conclusion

All of this together means that other than the very occasional use where I need to block out all external noise, these are now my main and only headphones and rarely leave my ears 5 , its an overused phrase and only applies to this latest version but they really are a game changer, if only they can get the reliability up to the same level as the version 2 headphones.

FootNotes
  1. and I mean a proper full day, 8-10 hours plus 2-4 hours commute, don’t give me that “30 hours if you keep charging them with a case” rubbish []
  2. they do it fast and without loud beeps and notifications[]
  3. Heaven knows how[]
  4. This downside is a bit unfair as it is part and parcel of their positive side[]
  5. I have even forgotten to take them off for a couple of showers and am very grateful they are splash proof[]

Function keys in a corporate environment

One of the necessary evils of doing work for corporate clients is that you often have to have in addition to all your own equipment a client’s laptop or PC. This is for obvious security reasons and is just how corporations work, but that does mean that often what is bought out of convenience for the corporation is not best of breed, and in fact, sometimes awful or missing entirely, headsets and decent keyboards are two of the most obvious examples.

Thankfully, while most corporations obviously ban you from installing your own software on their laptops, they have no objection to USB keyboards or the like. This is where programmable media keyboards come in.

Dedicated media keyboards are very useful. Particularly functions like “mic. toggle” and “camera toggle”. but I would not advise you use ones that have dedicated buttons that don’t need drivers, I’ve never had any luck with them as they are either very generic in the functions they trigger or don’t cater to the many different types of conference kit you might use 1.

So it’s much better to have your own programmable one that you can adjust to any need, but most of the time you are limited by the inability to load the driver software. However, good makes such as Vaydeer get around this. You actually flash the keyboard with the functions you want to use using your own computer, they’re stored permanently on the keyboard and then you can plug them in elsewhere driver free. This means that you can build up exactly what you want the keyboard to do. configure it and set it up on your laptop. Then, disconnect it, plug it straight in to your clients laptop simply as a standard keyboard which works on 99% of them.

As you can see on the above screen shot I have flashed the 2 left buttons on this keyboard with macros that work for Microsoft teams, and they work perfectly, you can also just swap keycaps for media ones, the two on this keyboard were stolen from a cheap dedicated one that didn’t work before I figured this solution out. Obviously, you can do sticky labels or what have you, for any kind of keycaps.

FootNotes
  1. ,Microsoft teams, Slack etc etc[]

A decent desktop fan for your shared workspace.

Most desktop or USB fans are dreadful examples of electronics. They are either ineffective or far worse they are incredibly noisy and vibrate a lot. If you are sharing an office with people, a noisy desktop fan is sooner or later going to lead to an assassination attempt, and as someone that runs permanently hot in all offices, I’ve always tried to use a really good, very quiet fan. For about 10 years this has been an out of date Thermatake fan.

 

It was their first attempt, and in my opinion their best one, its just a good quality fan with some components bolted on so it will sit on a desk and run off USB, unfortunately they replaced it with a run of the mill one that was all plastic and no fan, it made a dreadful noise and was no use at all. so I have been dreading the day when it finally gave out. I’ve tried alternatives, from good reputable brands, but they’ve always skimped on the actual fan itself, using rubbish imbalanced motors when they should have used a decent server or PC fan.

But there is a solution, when I started looking for a replacement to the Thermatake fan which had finally given out 1. I thought let’s see if I can just take a decent server fan and get a USB adapter for it. And searching like that, turns up the wonderful world of high end console cooling, these are domestic fans nearly all charged off USB and designed to be either laid against or stood next to high end consoles to help with their cooling, but as they are designed for the living room they often use good quality server fans.

This is one I’ve currently found. It works absolutely perfectly. It’s deathly silent and has two fans which makes it even better than my old one, I’ve used it in an office and can’t even hear it running. So rather than looking for desktop fans, look for console cooling fans. That will probably give you a better result and your work colleagues will thank you for it.

 

FootNotes
  1. actually the cable rather than the fan[]

Salesforce World Tour 2023

For me this was happily, a nice “mob handed” conference, harking back very much to the old pre pandemic style, where I knew multiple people and met with several groups during the day and the first one in a while where multiple members of LDC Via have attended. It was three times bigger than last year and packed with content.

This was another Excel centre conference in the same area as the AWS, Snowflake and Pokémon world championships, of all the recent conferences presented in this same space, this was by far the best laid out, very definitely a marketing conference, the whole Trailhead theme they’ve been running for a number of years, really makes the layout and the walking of the main showroom, a far more pleasant adventure than is normal.

One thing that was of note was that there were far less product venders than I would have expected. In fact, between every four to six of the stalls was a pure consultancy which I can tell you from personal experience are quite difficult to man as you don’t have much visually to show.

You could feel the “Sales” in Salesforce in this conference as there was a certain hard push to arrange a sales meeting as soon as possible, So it felt a tiny bit pushy compared to what would be a normal technical product conference. A feeling that was backed up by a number of my larger client contacts stating “Don’t make eye contact with the Vendors”

The technical content was less than I’d normally expect. But as I’ve just come from London’s calling a couple of weeks ago, that is a good pairing to do and they match each other well, however that’s not to say that wasn’t enough to see and do. As one of my colleagues pointed out there was actually too much for a one day conference, you couldn’t visit everything, this was really now a two day conference.

On a personal side I met up with a lot of people and we chewed the fat on projects and deliveries and reviewed the content of the main presentations.

The actual main presentation we’d all gone to see was exceptionally AI driven, far more than any of the other conferences recently, and spun slightly more towards the marketing side than the technical IT side, a number of the slides contained technical terms but with no explanation given so it was obvious who the target audience was.

 

The Legal “Forward looking Statements” document that was flashed up nearly gave me the giggles.

On the presentation side. they are assuming all your data is in salesforce, and if its not then Mulesoft can fix it, which made one of my eyebrows crawl up my forehead, also they were claiming to have been first with AI with Einstein, which I’m fairly sure IBM might argue with.

On the configuration of the AI, they are moving to the same sort of framework as many of the other vendors such as Microsoft and AWS, so they have caught up on the use of multiple engines, in addition they are using AI for easy template generation that can be linked to actions ,and most pleasantly a whole lay of extra security to stop your data from escaping, which is a massive selling point to me as understanding of AI data is not common knowledge yet.

              

A particular thank you goes out to Bluewave who had the best after dinner drinks, in which we fixed the world and all things Salesforce while drinking what felt like gallons of Beer 1. So exactly what you’d hope for at the end of a conference.

Conclusion

All in all, A long hard serious conference in the traditional form. A good 12 hours of solid networking, not quite the technical level that I prefer, but that’s because I’m a geek. But from a genuine conference “meet your clients”, “see what’s going on”, “find out what the business needs, and work out what you need to deliver on”, an excellent day.

FootNotes
  1. ,My LinkedIn looks like a bomb hit it today[]