In this episode, Thomas Domville provides a detailed walkthrough of the ElevenLabs Reader for iOS. This versatile app transforms any text content into natural, expressive speech using advanced AI-generated voices. Perfect for articles, ePubs, PDFs, and more, it enables users to enjoy their favorite content on the go. With an extensive and ever-growing library of voices, the app offers a personalized listening experience tailored to any mood or occasion.

ElevenLabs Reader: AI Audio on the App Store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/elevenlabs-reader-ai-audio/id6479373050

transcription:
Disclaimer: This transcript is generated by AIKO, an automated transcription service. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Hello and welcome.

My name is Thomas Domville, also known as AnonyMouse.

I'm going to introduce you to an app called 11 Labs Reader, and it's spelled just as it sounds like.

So 11 Labs is one word, E-L-E-V-E-N-L-A-B-S, 11 Labs, space, reader.

This is an amazing app that you definitely want to check out if there's something that interests you, of course.

So I'm going to do a nice little review and walk through and show you a demonstration how to use 11 Labs Reader.

Now before I do that, 11 Labs should sound familiar for most of you out there.

If you haven't heard of 11 Labs, no problem.

11 Labs has been around for some time now, and what they're known for is being able to take any text and convert it into audio for you to listen.

It's incredible technology.

It sounds marvelous, and it's trying to do its best to sound as natural as possible.

And I personally think they're getting really close to that moment where we will be able to say, wow, this is definitely a hit on their hands.

And I think this app is no doubt going to be something that's going to be popular by some of you out there.

Now I have used other apps.

I won't mention those names.

They will take various files like text files or probably PDFs or EPUBs and try to read it out using whatever voice over voices that we have now.

And as you know, well, for myself, I'm not a big fan of those things.

And it's really kind of hard to read books or listen to articles with those voices, especially when I come back in a background where I'm not used to using older voices such as eloquence and such things like that.

It just sounds very unnatural, very robotic.

So I'm really more into more natural sounding speech.

So this is no doubt one of the big app that I definitely going to keep on my main home screen from now on.

Now it's saying that there are some quirks and issues with this app.

Yeah, for the most part, it is accessible and usable.

Now there are some things that if you need to do, it can be difficult.

So I won't be pointing that out.

But I'm hoping that there's definitely going to be some update to this app and to making things more efficient for voice over users.

Overall, I think this app definitely has potential and it definitely is going to be something I'm going to be using a lot.

So let's go ahead and…

In this AppleVis Extra, Dave Nason and Thomas Domville engage in a discussion with Bryan Bashin and Hans Jørgen Wiberg from Be My Eyes about the acquisition of AppleVis. They tackle the tough questions, explore how Be My Eyes came to acquire AppleVis, and share insights into the experiences of the AppleVis Editorial Team before and after the acquisition.

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is generated by AIKO, an automated transcription service. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Hello there and welcome to the AppleVis Extra podcast, the first AppleBiz Extra podcast of the new era.

We wondered if we would have another one and we do.

We are so excited.

My name is Dave Nason and I'm joined as so often by Thomas Domville , also known as Anonymous Thomas.

How are you my friends?

Oh boy, that's a loaded question to come in.

How am I doing?

Well, you know, I'm ecstatic, I'm excited.

Gosh, what a whirlwind of emotion and whiplash that we have all gone through, right?

It's been a roller coaster, I think it's fair to say over the last, it hasn't only been a month because it feels like about three years.

Right.

It does feel like it's been going on for years, that's how much impact this has had on us, hasn't it?

It really has.

So I suppose for those who kind of maybe aren't sure, what happens?

And you know, we don't need to go into the absolute weeds, but kind of what happened on a high level in terms of, you know, getting to a point where Appleviz appears to be shutting down.

You know, yeah, let's start from the beginning.

So everybody will be on the same level as we are because we have had a lot of questions, a lot of critiques and I understand because I completely understand, we were in the same boat with you guys.

So what happened, guys?

Let's back up all the way to July.

This is when it all came down, was July 3rd.

I remember that specifically, it's right the day before America's Independence Day.

And we woke up with a bombshell of a news from David and, you know, David mentioned in there, he has talked about the first or thought about it for several months and a lot of people have asked us, we had several months, how come you haven't done anything during that time and to be quite fair to the editorial team is that no, we had zero idea, we had no idea.

It was just like we woke up and this bombshell was set.

And I think I can say it was so dramatic.

I will say that first two days just was a blur because I was still trying to digest and process like what in God's name is that mean for all of us in the community and everything.

But of course, the most important thing out of this whole thing was that David has reached a limit that he spent so much of his personal life into.

And so it was so understandable.

I completely understand where he was coming from.

I completely understand why he made that decision and why we're trying to process all this.

We were trying to figure out as a team what to do.

We had a meeting that weekend that we talked about the team and the steps that we wanted to take.

And during that meeting, David Goodwin was with us and he was very ill at that time.

We had no idea…

Join David Nason, Thomas Domville, Michael Hansen, and Tyler Stephen in this AppleVis Extra as they dive into the highlights of Apple’s ‘Glowtime’ Event.

transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is generated by AIKO, an automated transcription service. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Hello there and welcome to AppleViz Extra.

This is episode number 100.

My name is Dave Nason and this is a very exciting day guys.

We're back.

I'm joined by Thomas Domville, Tyler Stephen and Michael Hansen from the AppleViz team.

How are you guys?

I'm good.

I'm doing wonderful.

How are you Mr. Dave?

I am great.

It's an exciting day.

It's our first day back online.

Oh yeah, it's been a really, really exciting day and a big day for us and a big day for the community and love to share in just the outpour of support that we've seen on the website and people are back and it's a great day and it's also an Apple keynote day.

Yes, what timing we have, eh?

Well, it's ironic.

It's like we planned it on purpose.

Yes, so where again?

Every time what happens, I say I can't believe another year has gone by, but here we go. iPhone event again and some other stuff too.

It was an interesting event.

It opened actually with a video which had quite a lot of accessibility slash disability references in it.

I don't know if you guys noticed that, if you had the audio description on.

I did and that was very nice that they incorporate that, isn't it?

I mean, they always do like a million gazillion videos, but it just always seemed to be that first one.

That's always the most important one.

So putting accessibility in there was a nice touch.

Yeah, that was cool.

And then Tim came on stage or wherever he was outside somewhere.

He seemed to be shouting a lot at the start.

I don't know if anyone else noticed that, but yeah, he set the scene.

He mentioned Apple intelligence in pretty much his first sentence, I think.

So I think that kind of set the scene for the afternoon or for the morning.

Right.

It was almost like, you know how WWDC, we had this Christmas gift and we opened it.

It's like, oh, Apple intelligence.

We were so excited.

They just went ba ba ba ba ba ba ba all the way down.

I feel like today they just rewrapped the gift and we just reopened it because they just went through the whole same thing over again.

And you know, Google were accused of exactly the same thing at their Pixel event that they just re-advanced.

I thought I was hearing some familiar things.

They were talking about iOS 18 and all of a sudden I was like, wait a minute, this is not anything new.

I mean, okay, you want to re-advance.

Okay, that's kind of how you know you're getting to the end of the announcement of whatever the product is.

They start talking about the software.

They're refreshing you on what to expect.

Yeah, I think that's the thing about AI marketing is that when you're marketing that and it's so much of that is software based, you got to kind of beat the drums, the AI drums as much as you can.

Apple doesn't use the term, specific term…

Welcome to AppleVis Extra 101, where Dave Nason is joined by Xiaoran Wang and Huasong Cao from Agiga, the team behind the upcoming Echo Vision smart glasses. Check out some early demos, with more to come, on their YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@AgigaAi/videos And learn more on their website at: https://echovision.agiga.ai/ The team would love to hear your feedback, so please comment below, or contact them through the website.

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by Aiko, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Hello there and welcome to the AppleVis Extra.

This is episode number 101.

My name is David Nason and I'm delighted to be joined by two fantastic guests from Agiga.

We have Xiaoran Wang and HuaSong Cao

Is that correct, guys?

Thank you, David.

Thank you for having us.

So yeah, delighted.

And the product you're going to talk to us about is the Echo Vision.

So before we get into that, though, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourselves, the company, what you do, really, and how it all came about?

Sure.

My name is Xiaoran.

I'm the CEO, and before doing this company, actually, I had long experience building and shaping intelligent devices.

I started my career at Amazon Level 26.

That's the first place of the world's first Kindle and also the world's first Alexa.

And I was actually in the early team that developed Alexa devices.

And this experience gave me good exposure and got me enough experience on how to build a good intelligent device.

I think that's one of the confidence I brought in when I was doing this company that we can build a great product for the community.

Brilliant, and obviously, Alexa, a device that's very popular, being a voice-first product, very popular in the blind and visually impaired community.

So yeah, that's really cool.

And tell us about yourself, Hua Song.

Yeah, thanks, David.

So my name is Hua Song, and I'm an engineer by training.

Before I started this company with Xiaoran, I was with Google for about nine to ten years.

I did various software projects, and the latest one is Google Assistant, the voice assistant similar to Amazon counterparts.

Yeah, I've been enjoying doing software, building stuff, both hardware and software.

And with Giga, what we are trying to do is really to use our expertise built prior to this company and take that to something that we can really use to help everyone.

That's brilliant.

So do you want to quickly tell us what the product is, and then we can delve into a bit more detail.

Yeah, so the product is called EchoVision.

By looking, it looks like a normal pair of glasses.

The key feature is to articulate visual information into voices.

Think about it.

If you can't see this, and there's someone next to you, how will this person help you?

So basically, he or she is going to describe it for you, like read it out for you.

And that's how we envision our product, basically.

It's like an assistant, a virtual assistant that does this work for you.

Well, I was going to…

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Harborne resident Nick Noble talks about plans to build on Ravenhurst playing fields.

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