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
trammell
 ·  · 25m read
 · 
Introduction When a system is made safer, its users may be willing to offset at least some of the safety improvement by using it more dangerously. A seminal example is that, according to Peltzman (1975), drivers largely compensated for improvements in car safety at the time by driving more dangerously. The phenomenon in general is therefore sometimes known as the “Peltzman Effect”, though it is more often known as “risk compensation”.[1] One domain in which risk compensation has been studied relatively carefully is NASCAR (Sobel and Nesbit, 2007; Pope and Tollison, 2010), where, apparently, the evidence for a large compensation effect is especially strong.[2] In principle, more dangerous usage can partially, fully, or more than fully offset the extent to which the system has been made safer holding usage fixed. Making a system safer thus has an ambiguous effect on the probability of an accident, after its users change their behavior. There’s no reason why risk compensation shouldn’t apply in the existential risk domain, and we arguably have examples in which it has. For example, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) makes AI more reliable, all else equal; so it may be making some AI labs comfortable releasing more capable, and so maybe more dangerous, models than they would release otherwise.[3] Yet risk compensation per se appears to have gotten relatively little formal, public attention in the existential risk community so far. There has been informal discussion of the issue: e.g. risk compensation in the AI risk domain is discussed by Guest et al. (2023), who call it “the dangerous valley problem”. There is also a cluster of papers and works in progress by Robert Trager, Allan Dafoe, Nick Emery-Xu, Mckay Jensen, and others, including these two and some not yet public but largely summarized here, exploring the issue formally in models with multiple competing firms. In a sense what they do goes well beyond this post, but as far as I’m aware none of t
 ·  · 1m read
 · 
 ·  · 19m read
 · 
I am no prophet, and here’s no great matter. — T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”   This post is a personal account of a California legislative campaign I worked on March-June 2024, in my capacity as the indoor air quality program lead at 1Day Sooner. It’s very long—I included as many details as possible to illustrate a playbook of everything we tried, what the surprises and challenges were, and how someone might spend their time during a policy advocacy project.   History of SB 1308 Advocacy Effort SB 1308 was introduced in the California Senate by Senator Lena Gonzalez, the Senate (Floor) Majority Leader, and was sponsored by Regional Asthma Management and Prevention (RAMP). The bill was based on a report written by researchers at UC Davis and commissioned by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The bill sought to ban the sale of ozone-emitting air cleaners in California, which would have included far-UV, an extremely promising tool for fighting pathogen transmission and reducing pandemic risk. Because California is such a large market and so influential for policy, and the far-UV industry is struggling, we were seriously concerned that the bill would crush the industry. A partner organization first notified us on March 21 about SB 1308 entering its comment period before it would be heard in the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, but said that their organization would not be able to be publicly involved. Very shortly after that, a researcher from Ushio America, a leading far-UV manufacturer, sent out a mass email to professors whose support he anticipated, requesting comments from them. I checked with my boss, Josh Morrison,[1] as to whether it was acceptable for 1Day Sooner to get involved if the partner organization was reluctant, and Josh gave me the go-ahead to submit a public comment to the committee. Aware that the letters alone might not do much, Josh reached out to a friend of his to ask about lobbyists with expertise in Cal