I’m in the last stage of getting Badlands Book 3 ready for the beta readers and trying out a new tool. I read my stories out loud to catch tongue twisters, clunky words, and sentences that just read funny, not only because we read books to ourselves with an internal voice but also because someday I want to move these books into audio and this will make it easier on the poor voice artist. I used to be that poor voice artist and near the end of every book I would freak out my family with two weeks of strange mutterings coming from the office followed by an evening of my scratchy, hoarse ramblings at the dinner table. And you know what? I still didn’t catch all the typos because I’d often read what I thought I wrote, regardless of what was there in black and white.
Enter Accessibility Options -> Speech.
Computer speech has come a long way since I messed around with it in high school to play pranks on my friends. (Nothing like having a Steven Hawking-style vocoder suddenly shout “Hello, Larry!” when high-strung Larry thinks the room is empty.) Two years back I had Siri read things on my phone but alas, I write Science Fiction and Fantasy and some words like “ornithopter,” “deader,” and “Kikuchiyo” would give her problems. (On the flip side, this is why it’s hard for me to do computer dictation too. When you have to call K’uattu Z’brock of Malorvis IV “Bob” so the transcription works, it’s hard to keep your head in the story, you know?)
Things are better now, especially with services like Descript that can almost do AI audiobook narration. I downloaded some enhanced voices for my Mac and discovered the narration is not that bad. After 15 minutes, I got used to the inflections and phrasing and went all-in on having the computer read my book to me. Not only does it read what’s actually on the page, it catches those missing articles like “a” and “the,” and picks out with words like “though” and “through” that spellcheck doesn’t flag and the eye doesn’t see when it’s skimming text. Best of all, passive listening frees up mental bandwidth and I’ve caught errors from chapter to chapter because I’m holding more of the story in my head.
My computer is reading my story to me and for the first time in a while, I’m able to enjoy my book as a reader.
And yes, it’s able to pronounce the funny sci-fi words.
Have you tried this before? What did you think? Leave me a note in the comments!
