I don't even know where to start. There is so much that I like about play.ht, I'll try not to make this too long.
I first sought out to find a solution to clone my own voice so that as an audiobook narrator, when I got sick and sounded nasal or lost my voice due to laryngitis, it wouldn't stop me from creating new work.
What I got instead, was a mind-blowing look into what's available and possible today. The technology they use and the intuitive way that the AI interprets the text is so stunning and smart, that with a few clever tweaks on the side of the user, anyone can make themselves sound smooth and professional even if they are not outstandings speakers.
Admittedly, I had an advantage because I was able to upload 20 or 30 hours of high quality recordings with no background noise due to the fact that I'm already an audiobook narrator and I worked hard to get this clean body of work.
Learning the little quirks and pro tips of how to make the system work better was like getting to know a new friend. What it likes, what it doesn't like. And because it gave so much back to me, I worked hard to give it what it liked best.
Play.ht prefers short paragraphs. It prefers numbers spelled out. It prefers periods over commas. In fact, the only time you should use a comma is for lists. The system is smart enough that it knows when to put the pauses in because it understands syntax so well, it renders the sentences just like a person would.
If for some reason, you're not crazy about how one sentence turned out, you can hit the button and render it again and it will come out different each time. Sometimes putting a word in all caps will emphasize it.
There are so many other tips and tricks that I could give, this review could go on for days. Suffice it to say that I have had so much fun learning how to make play.ht work for me that I now feel like an expert since I can use it to crank out finished, flawless audio faster than I could read it manually.
It's been a game changer for my audio book narration. I still sometimes can't believe that it works as well as it does. And when it doesn't, I love the challenge of getting it to do what I want it to because it just means that I have to figure out how to communicate what I want which is usually just tweaking the text.
One example is the name Phoebe. It read the name Phoebe and it sounded so funny because it read it phonetically. So instead, I did a global replacement in the entire text and I spelled it Feebee. And it worked perfectly.
It's important that you be able to change the text that you give it to read. Remove all exclamation marks. Even some question marks should be removed because play.ht will make it sound better without the punctuation. Try it both ways and see what you like.
Overall, this technology is worth its weight in gold. I am so thrilled that I discovered it. It is head and shoulders above any of its competitors which I also checked out. I am sticking with this for the long-term.
When I play samples for other people and tell them that this is my voice, but I did not read this, people say, "oh that's so scary."
I laugh because I understand what they mean. It feels like science fiction but we've arrived. It's a great time to be alive. I've always wanted to clone myself I n order to get more done and I finally got my wish. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There's very little I dislike. Twice while creating custom voices on the best plan possible, the system got stuck in the cloning process and after a few months, it still says that it's cloning. I don't mind because I just breeze past those voices that still show in progress and go to the voices that are already complete. The fact that I can upload a voice of myself doing an Australian accent and have the system crank out any dialogue with me speaking in Australian accent is so amazing and incredible that scrolling past few unnecessary items in my dashboard is really the least of my worries. I would not have even written this except that there was a prompt about what I specifically disliked. Maybe if there was a lifetime price, I would buy it even if it was thousands of dollars. That's about the only other thing I would improve and for early adopters of the technology, it would be kind of a nice perk. Eventually, everyone is going to embrace this incredible technology. At least I hope they do! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
