I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new feature on the 80,000 Hours website: as of today, you can now listen to state-of-the-art text-to-speech audio versions of all of our podcast transcripts!

We're including the entire 146-episode back catalogue at launch — that's over 300 hours of listening material for our audience to enjoy whenever they choose.

We hope that this new feature can bring our podcast transcripts to an all new audience of audiophiles and those who prefer listening to content rather than reading it. 

And since it also works on mobile, you can now listen to our podcast transcripts while doing the dishes, walking the dog, or on your daily commute!

I'm really excited about this inititative making our podcast transcripts more widely accessible, and helping spread important ideas about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.

Feel free to ask any questions about our new feature in the comments.

Comments10


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

When I read your scripts and Rob is interviewing, I like to read Rob’s questions at twice the speed of the interviewees’ responses. Can you accommodate that with your audio version?

Thanks for the suggestion David! We're discussing adding this as a premium feature — perhaps activated only for Giving What We Can members.

I listen at 5x speed and I’d find it much easier if you could add some filler words (like “um”, “ah”, “like”, “you know”) into the audio versions of the transcripts. This would aid with comprehension.

This would would make the difference between me bothering to listen and being compelled to trash it on twitter.

Thanks so much for all you do! Very much appreciate it 😀

If you like, I have some extra bandwidth this week and could transcribe some of them.

Is it possible to first translate it to Latin and then back to English? I do this with the text versions of the podcast transcripts and find that it improves the quality of reasoning of the host in particular.

We love to see / hear it!

Can you confirm that you will be using text-to-audio AI voices that have been trained on Rob's actual voice and the other guests' and hosts' voices? Kelsey Piper's new blog, Planned Obsolescence, does this, and it works very well (with a delicious undertone of uncanny valley). I think it would be great for authenticity, and strengthening the parasocial bond between audience and creator.

If this proves too costly, I would suggest it's still worth just getting the hosts and guests to read out the transcripts themselves, because the benefits of voice authenticity are hard to overstate.

Oh god, I’ve done this unironically when the difference in speed was too great between the speakers. Otherwise I would’ve had to listen to it at 1.5x or switch back and forth all the time. xD

This is interesting, but I'm not sure I'll have the time to listen to it. Maybe make transcripts of these audio versions?

Thanks Bella.

I'm just wondering, would there be an audio description feature to make it feel more alive? Eg: If t he script calls for [manic laughter], will this be replicated or will it only be read aloud as such?

 

Many thanks

Bill

Someone says they'd actual use it!

Excuse the typos, I'll vouch for Tripp. 

Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 20m read
 · 
Advanced AI could unlock an era of enlightened and competent government action. But without smart, active investment, we’ll squander that opportunity and barrel blindly into danger. Executive summary See also a summary on Twitter / X. The US federal government is falling behind the private sector on AI adoption. As AI improves, a growing gap would leave the government unable to effectively respond to AI-driven existential challenges and threaten the legitimacy of its democratic institutions. A dual imperative → Government adoption of AI can’t wait. Making steady progress is critical to: * Boost the government’s capacity to effectively respond to AI-driven existential challenges * Help democratic oversight keep up with the technological power of other groups * Defuse the risk of rushed AI adoption in a crisis → But hasty AI adoption could backfire. Without care, integration of AI could: * Be exploited, subverting independent government action * Lead to unsafe deployment of AI systems * Accelerate arms races or compress safety research timelines Summary of the recommendations 1. Work with the US federal government to help it effectively adopt AI Simplistic “pro-security” or “pro-speed” attitudes miss the point. Both are important — and many interventions would help with both. We should: * Invest in win-win measures that both facilitate adoption and reduce the risks involved, e.g.: * Build technical expertise within government (invest in AI and technical talent, ensure NIST is well resourced) * Streamline procurement processes for AI products and related tech (like cloud services) * Modernize the government’s digital infrastructure and data management practices * Prioritize high-leverage interventions that have strong adoption-boosting benefits with minor security costs or vice versa, e.g.: * On the security side: investing in cyber security, pre-deployment testing of AI in high-stakes areas, and advancing research on mitigating the ris
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
In our recent strategy retreat, the GWWC Leadership Team recognised that by spreading our limited resources across too many projects, we are unable to deliver the level of excellence and impact that our mission demands. True to our value of being mission accountable, we've therefore made the difficult but necessary decision to discontinue a total of 10 initiatives. By focusing our energy on fewer, more strategically aligned initiatives, we think we’ll be more likely to ultimately achieve our Big Hairy Audacious Goal of 1 million pledgers donating $3B USD to high-impact charities annually. (See our 2025 strategy.) We’d like to be transparent about the choices we made, both to hold ourselves accountable and so other organisations can take the gaps we leave into account when planning their work. As such, this post aims to: * Inform the broader EA community about changes to projects & highlight opportunities to carry these projects forward * Provide timelines for project transitions * Explain our rationale for discontinuing certain initiatives What’s changing  We've identified 10 initiatives[1] to wind down or transition. These are: * GWWC Canada * Effective Altruism Australia funding partnership * GWWC Groups * Giving Games * Charity Elections * Effective Giving Meta evaluation and grantmaking * The Donor Lottery * Translations * Hosted Funds * New licensing of the GWWC brand  Each of these is detailed in the sections below, with timelines and transition plans where applicable. How this is relevant to you  We still believe in the impact potential of many of these projects. Our decision doesn’t necessarily reflect their lack of value, but rather our need to focus at this juncture of GWWC's development.  Thus, we are actively looking for organisations and individuals interested in taking on some of these projects. If that’s you, please do reach out: see each project's section for specific contact details. Thank you for your continued support as we
 ·  · 11m read
 · 
Our Mission: To build a multidisciplinary field around using technology—especially AI—to improve the lives of nonhumans now and in the future.  Overview Background This hybrid conference had nearly 550 participants and took place March 1-2, 2025 at UC Berkeley. It was organized by AI for Animals for $74k by volunteer core organizers Constance Li, Sankalpa Ghose, and Santeri Tani.  This conference has evolved since 2023: * The 1st conference mainly consisted of philosophers and was a single track lecture/panel. * The 2nd conference put all lectures on one day and followed it with 2 days of interactive unconference sessions happening in parallel and a week of in-person co-working. * This 3rd conference had a week of related satellite events, free shared accommodations for 50+ attendees, 2 days of parallel lectures/panels/unconferences, 80 unique sessions, of which 32 are available on Youtube, Swapcard to enable 1:1 connections, and a Slack community to continue conversations year round. We have been quickly expanding this conference in order to prepare those that are working toward the reduction of nonhuman suffering to adapt to the drastic and rapid changes that AI will bring.  Luckily, it seems like it has been working!  This year, many animal advocacy organizations attended (mostly smaller and younger ones) as well as newly formed groups focused on digital minds and funders who spanned both of these spaces. We also had more diversity of speakers and attendees which included economists, AI researchers, investors, tech companies, journalists, animal welfare researchers, and more. This was done through strategic targeted outreach and a bigger team of volunteers.  Outcomes On our feedback survey, which had 85 total responses (mainly from in-person attendees), people reported an average of 7 new connections (defined as someone they would feel comfortable reaching out to for a favor like reviewing a blog post) and of those new connections, an average of 3