I and many of my friends regularly wake up to do the 7am clickthrough on recreation.gov and often (though not always) are successful for the dates we're trying to get.
Oh yeah agreed that the change in prices doesn't prove it's a scam, my thought was more along the lines of - when crypto insiders who have been talking up crypto as valuable/important because it's independent of the government quickly change their tune and cheer on government intervention when it goes into their pockets, it makes it pretty clear what the dynamic actually is.
Definitely, but none of my obvious suspects from my immediate network are looking/a good fit. A post like this is both to find people I don't know who might be a good fit as well as to surface this to people I do know but that I might not have otherwise thought to reach out to.
Also Azure actually! Yeah for a sentence or two the onboard OCR usually gets it right, but if you’re listening to a few pages at a time there are almost always a bunch of errors and it gets pretty exasperating to listen to.
Makes sense, one other interesting use case would be looping in translation into the middle of the pipeline so that you could scan a book in a language you don't speak and have it read to you in a language you do speak.
Yes this is a very valid point, on a technical level it's definitely a 2-step thing. From a product perspective I'm framing it as a "this app reads books out loud to you" but if I start hearing about people using it to grab the text out (which is possible right now) I'll definitely consider paying more attention to that use case.
Yeah I (and my fiancée) are also Audible users — this app is mostly for cases where an audiobook or even e-book don't exist, like for older books you might get from a used bookstore or library. I'd prefer to set the price point lower, but if a user uses their 250-scan quota (which can be up to 500 pages, since you can scan 2 at a time) fully, I'll actually be losing about $10 on them that month, so I'm hoping not everyone uses their full quota!
That said, I'm expecting OCR, LLM, and TTS API prices to continue coming down, at which point I'll be able to drop the price and raise the quota. Honestly I suspect iOS itself should be able to handle this use case well sooner or later, but until then, there's this app :).
iOS has pretty decent built-in OCR and TTS but give it a try on a book page if you're curious — unfortunately the OCR makes a lot of mistakes (as well as including footnotes etc.) and the TTS is still pretty robotic. I do hope and expect they'll improve soon, though, at which point the only advantage of this app will be that it can scan multiple pages at a time — probably not enough of an advantage to justify its existence at that point although I'll see what users say. For now, as far as I've seen it's the highest-quality option for this (granted, very niche) paper-to-audio use case.
All languages will be tough but adding common ones that are already supported by off-the-shelf OCR, TTS, and LLMs is definitely doable; do you have any that you're most keen on?
Yes, their quality is great but the cost is astronomical — I pay about $8 in Azure TTS bills alone for TTS-ing a 500-page book (what you can scan per month with a $10 subscription), whereas Eleven Labs would be about $100 for the same length. I found Azure to be the best bang-for-the-buck, although I'm on the lookout for more affordable high-quality TTS, which would also let me drop the price point of the app.
I and many of my friends regularly wake up to do the 7am clickthrough on recreation.gov and often (though not always) are successful for the dates we're trying to get.