The audio of the podcast “The internet, How long will Google’s magic last?” from EnglishLingQ
sounds strange for me. Was it done with a text to speech service?
You are precisely correct. In fact, in the audio file itself this is noted: “This recording was creating using w-w-w-dot-spokentext-dot-net”,
thank you alex, I didn’t know this webpage and didn’t recognise it by listening. It sounds quite good for a “text to speech” but still unnatural. For learning I’ll prefer podcasts with human’s audio.
In my view we should remove any text to speech content. What do others think?
I agree.
yes, it is not suitable for a language learning system
I have the tendency to agree, but I’d still like to hear what some others think about this.
Alex, on further reflection, we should remove any text to speech lessons. We have always insisted on natural, native speaker content in our library. Anyone who wants to listen to text to speech can import content or use the bookmarklet and use text to speech to listen to it. This is not something we want in the library.
I’ve removed several lessons that used Text-To-Speech (TTS) in the audio.
Everyone, please let us know if you come across any other lessons that use TTS and we will make sure to remove them from the Library.