I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new feature on the 80,000 Hours website: as of today, you can now listen to state-of-the-art text-to-speech audio versions of all of our podcast transcripts!
We're including the entire 146-episode back catalogue at launch — that's over 300 hours of listening material for our audience to enjoy whenever they choose.
We hope that this new feature can bring our podcast transcripts to an all new audience of audiophiles and those who prefer listening to content rather than reading it.
And since it also works on mobile, you can now listen to our podcast transcripts while doing the dishes, walking the dog, or on your daily commute!
I'm really excited about this inititative making our podcast transcripts more widely accessible, and helping spread important ideas about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.
Feel free to ask any questions about our new feature in the comments.
We love to see / hear it!
Can you confirm that you will be using text-to-audio AI voices that have been trained on Rob's actual voice and the other guests' and hosts' voices? Kelsey Piper's new blog, Planned Obsolescence, does this, and it works very well (with a delicious undertone of uncanny valley). I think it would be great for authenticity, and strengthening the parasocial bond between audience and creator.
If this proves too costly, I would suggest it's still worth just getting the hosts and guests to read out the transcripts themselves, because the benefits of voice authenticity are hard to overstate.