I want to test how good are audiobooks produced with newest products. Some friend told me about good 11labs is. I will test it with some real book and maybe some blog posts.

But when I tried creating some audiobook I saw that free plan doesnt allow for too much. To generate one full length audiobook I would need around 170 000 tokens, on free plan I get 10 000 tokens monthly. and I estimate I would need to buy 99 $ subscription that gives 500 000 tokens monthly. Creator, which is 11 $ for first month and 22 % later, gives only 100 000 tokens monthly.

This friend told me that he can get quite a lot of hourse out of free subscribtion, I need to ask him how he does that, maybe I make some mistake.

When I saw that I remembered how much content on youtube is audio content generated by ai, and text content behind it also generated or written by someone. And I remembered seeing some discussion somewhere on how good but expensive 11labs is and looking for alternatives. I don’t remember if they were trying to find simple text to speech or debate generator, which generates audio debate between 2 bots? (I’m not sure if you need to write whole script for bots yourself, how exactly this works on 11 labs?)

So I think I will go the same path and test alternatives before testing 11labs. I’m afraid that if I get a hit of high quality product I won’t be able to go back to worse quality alternatives but if it’s the other way around it might not be that hard.

And if I use it personally, to generate some audiobooks for myself, I could maybe justify the expense but it would be hard to spend so much money to use their api as part of some product unless this product would have big margins.

Is elevenreader the same as 11labs? Hmm, maybe my friend was talking about it. I see that it’s the same, it’s owned by 11labs but it’s much cheaper and doesn’t give rights to sell audio on other platforms.

But if I use elevenreader, the content will be posted publically, and I would earn money for people listening to it. So 11labs is trying to build their own content platform this way. Will it be posted by my account or anonymously?

Ah, no, it’s optionall, it is possible for it to stay private. I can’t share the result, as I can’t export it from the app. But if other people have the same book, they can turn it into audiobok the same way. There are 10 hours on free account. 15 more hours is 5 $, 30 hours is 10 $ . Ultra subscribtion is unlimited listening, 500 natural voices (are they not included in free?), offline downloads (probably still stays inside app?). I think that’s quite good.

I will try to “sell” this free version of 11reader to some of my friends and see what they think, I think it’s pretty good product

other options

Let’s consider other options, with focus on free and open source ones. But I run out of eneergy so I will update this post later, if not, it’s good enough to be left alone, I think.