This is great! I would love an explicit "set bookmark to here" button if I scroll up from the high watermark
I discovered the reset, but it took a minute and I expect given the way I read being able to explicitly walk the high watermark back a bit would be nice (maybe that's doable if you select text? I didn't try!)
The format is nice, I love standard ebooks
I opened Moby Dick but didn't see how to listen to it on my phone, not sure what the status of the "listen" effort is.
I listened to some books from standard ebooks using eleven labs, but I'm really excited about a better implementation
moby dick didn't align properly, there's a confidence gate it didn't pass.
i know, it makes me sad too, i'll keep working on it
this is the list of everything: https://tale.fyi/audiobooks
librivox is all human volunteers, so i think it makes a difference from eleven labs, but i might add a fallback to ai readings for folks who want that
reset feedback noted!
> moby dick didn't align properly, there's a confidence gate it didn't pass.
What does this mean?
well! (i've been waiting for someone to ask ha)
when i first knew i wanted to align audio to text, i reached for aeneas, which was built for this exact problem/product (https://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/)
however, it drifted by hundreds of seconds deep into chapters and emits no confidence signal, so i couldn't eval it cleanly
so i switched to a neural acoustic model trained with ctc (meta's massively multilingual speech aligner, it ships inside torchaudio): it outputs a probability for each character at every frame of audio, and viterbi decoding finds the most probable path that spells exactly our text, with a per-word probability
that probability is the gate: a book ships read-along only if its median confidence and coverage clear a bar. moby dick's didn't, so it's honestly text-only
Could the problem be Moby Dick’s infamously large vocabulary, which contains words used essentially nowhere else?
i actually had an out-of-memory bug, which i've since fixed. chewing through it now to see if we can get it
got it working! https://tale.fyi/moby-dick
it got confused by some of the more uhh complex passages ;-)