Voices, Voices! And British accent
Listenly was launched around 8 months ago, and during all that time there was only one voice available.
It is kind of funny: I just selected the lower male voice that I liked and didn’t bother to implement a voice selector. 1200+ signed in users, more than 150 purchases, and all that with one single voice. Crazy!
However, the time has come to move on.
Today, the Voice Selector is released 🎉
Here’s how it works.
Set the default voice in your Profile
On the profile page, you can listen to all the available voices and select a default one.
It will be used for all of your new uploads, books in the Listenly store, and for free public items; you can change it at any time.
There are 6 voices — 3 male ones and 3 female ones.
One of the male voices has a British accent — some people asked me about it, now it’s finally here.
Books from Listenly’s store
All the 70,000 books are now available in all new voices.
You can listen to a sample in any voice for free.
Your previously purchased books
Unfortunately, each voice variant of the book has to be purchased separately. I know it’s not cool, but the audio generation for each voice runs separately and has TTS API costs.
If you try to change the voice of your previously purchased book, you will see the “Buy” button again, and you will be able to switch back to the purchased variant.
If you have purchased a book but haven’t started listening to it yet (no audio has been generated or exported), and you want to select a different voice, reply to this email and I will help you change the voice of your book for free.
Your uploads (e-books, links, PDFs, etc.)
You can change the voice of all your uploaded files and links in the same way.
If you share it with friends — they will be able to listen only to the variant that you selected (to not drain all your balance by generating audio with 6 different voices).
Again, if you have already generated audio, and you change the voice now, you will be charged for the hours a second time. Every new audio track costs money, and I just can’t afford to make it free 🙁
But I hope it’s not a big deal. I cannot imagine many situations where you would like to generate the same book with different voices over and over again.
Discount!
Use promo code “VOICES” on the checkout page for a 30% discount for every plan or book during the next two weeks (until November 2).
— Evan, but you said that you have no profit, how can you offer a discount? 😡
— I have some credits from OpenAI that cover TTS costs for now, which is why I can offer discounts, make free collections in a public library, and sell long books on the Listenly store for 50% of the cost. Thank you, OpenAI and Microsoft Startup Founders program! 🙏🏻
But these credits might disappear at any time, so I cannot let them affect the pricing.
What’s next
I know, I know… I promised to release RSS Feeds for Podcast apps 2 emails ago.
One of the users asked for different voices, and I just felt inspiration to do it. It became quite a project with all the edge-cases for store, custom uploads, free public library items, and so on.
But the good thing is that when I will finally release RSS feeds — you will be able to listen to them in different voices! Cool, right? 🫣 👉🏻👈🏻
If you will encounter any problems or bugs, please let me know so I could quickly fix it.
Thank you for using Listenly!