<story><title>Free public domain audiobooks</title><url>https://librivox.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JZL003</author><text>For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive&amp;#x27;s scanned book&amp;#x27;s OCR -&amp;gt; TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be professionally narrated&lt;p&gt;And for anyone who listens to a lot of audio, I&amp;#x27;d look into using an audio equalizer. Pulling down the high frequencies (especially for some woman narrators) makes it more comfortable after many hours of listening. On android the &amp;quot;Smart audiobook&amp;quot; app has this and it&amp;#x27;s really nice. Maybe some headphones&amp;#x2F;android phones can do this globally</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Eelongate</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve listened to numerous books (mostly but not exclusively fiction) using TTS and I&amp;#x27;d like to confirm this experience.  It&amp;#x27;s kind of remarkable, once I became accustomed to the sound of the TTS program the weirdness just sort of evaporated and I was left with an experience that feels very similar to reading visually.</text></comment>
<story><title>Free public domain audiobooks</title><url>https://librivox.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JZL003</author><text>For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive&amp;#x27;s scanned book&amp;#x27;s OCR -&amp;gt; TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be professionally narrated&lt;p&gt;And for anyone who listens to a lot of audio, I&amp;#x27;d look into using an audio equalizer. Pulling down the high frequencies (especially for some woman narrators) makes it more comfortable after many hours of listening. On android the &amp;quot;Smart audiobook&amp;quot; app has this and it&amp;#x27;s really nice. Maybe some headphones&amp;#x2F;android phones can do this globally</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Simorgh</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been playing around with the IBM TTS for audiozing research papers. I think that research should be more accessible and I think that the audioform is the way forward.&lt;p&gt;The comprehension of powerful ideas should be easy, effortless and intuitive. Listening to content has the double benefit of ensuring that talking about complex subjects is all the more familiar. If you&amp;#x27;ve been introduced to a topic through speech, talking about it is all the more natural.</text></comment>