I like this idea and would use it if it were available.
FactorialCode mentioned voice synthesis. As its cheaper, the karma threshold could be lowered and more content could be shared out as audio. I would be really interested in episodes that go over the curated content such as Rationality A to Z, and The Codex.
Are there any concerns around licensing?
This seems to me like it would depend a lot on the kind of quality that you get for ~25 USD/post.
A lot of people have offered help to record episodes, so we could optimize for quality and cost, and maybe it would cheaper than ~25 USD/post.
oh yeah, good point. checking the rate for a few for 1615 words. here's my search: https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?query=record%20voice%20in%20english&source=top-bar&search_in=category&search-autocomplete-original-term=record%20voice%20in%20english&sub_category=16&ref=purpose%3Apodcast%7Clanguage%3Aenglish%7Caccent%3Aenglish_american%7Cage_range%3Ayoung_adult
(note: 1 CAD cost 0.74 USD)
Yeah, that's pretty pricy. Google is telling me that they can do 1 million characters/month for free using a wavenet. That might be good enough.
meta: experimental post format
x-post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LWCoordination/permalink/1002564020177098/ (originally posted on 2020-06-21)
There was 6 posts with >100 karma in the last 30 days on LessWrong. I think we could get someone to audiorecord an article for ~25 USD. We would need ~150 USD / month to sustain that.
How much would you pay per month to have LessWrong posts with >100 karma available in audio format? How many episodes would you be ready to record per month? (on a volunteer basis or not?)
If it adds up to more than 6 episode-equivalent (in time or money) per month, I'll go ahead with the project.
We have a professional mic and good readers at the Macroscope, but if someone else would be interested in doing the reading (for money or as a volunteer), let me know (EtA: on this thread)
Total so far: ~1 episode-equivalent