Happy to see more work here.

Minor question - but are you familiar with any experiments that might show which are the most understandable, especially at high speeds? It seems to me like some voices are much better than others at 2x+ speeds, I assume it should be possible to optimize this. This is probably the main thing I personally care about. 

The results of the listener survey were equivocal. Listener preferences varied widely, with Ryan (our existing voice) and Echo coming out tied and slightly on top, but not with statistical significance. [1]

Given that, we plan to stick with Ryan for now. Two considerations that influence this call, independently of the survey result:

1. There's an habituation effect, such that switching costs for existing hardcore listeners are significant.
2. There's some evidence that more expressive voices are less comprehensible at high listening speeds. Ryan is less expressive than the other voices we tested.

We'll survey again—or perhaps just switch based on our judgement—when better models are released.

[1] Above a basic quality threshhold, people's preferences for human narrators also seem to vary wildly. We've found that the same human narrators elicit feedback that can be characterised as "love letters" and "hate mail"—in surprisingly similar proportions.

Hi @peterhartree, I'm getting an error when trying to open the voting form: 

"You need permission - This form can only be viewed by users in the owner's organization."
 

Thanks for all your hard work on the audio narrations and making EA Forum content accessible!

Question: Do you intend to license the audio under a Creative Commons license? Since EA Forum text since 2022 is licensed under CC-BY 4.0, all that's legally required is any attribution info provided by the source material and a link to the license; derived works don't have to be also licensed under CC-BY. However, to the extent that AI-generated narrations can be protected by copyright at all (e.g. in the UK and Hong Kong), it seems appropriate to use CC-BY, or maybe CC-BY-SA to enforce modifications being under the same terms.