Well, it turns out that Play.ht has gone bankrupt.
I hadn’t seen any news about it, so when I came to do my latest blog post, I found the site was down with no indication of support, no notice, and no email. A bit disappointing, but there you go. The internet gives, and the internet takes away.
That still left me with a problem. I need a decent text-to-speech converter. I use one both to ensure all my blog posts have an audio version and because, as someone who is badly dyslexic, I find it the best way of proofreading my work. Listening to my posts read aloud helps me spot those moments when I think, What on earth is that? and correct my gibbering.
So, I had a good trawl around with a specific set of requirements. What I wanted was something where I could paste my blog text, have it follow punctuation properly, let me listen and review easily, work quickly, and not cost a fortune.
After a fair bit of digging (and trying a few others I won’t name and shame), I ended up with Async.ai, which met all my needs. It has an easy login, a simple text-to-speech interface with a large input box, sensible formatting, and a solid range of voices and styles to choose from. It generates speech far faster than Play.ht ever did, and you can download the output as a WAV file. I then convert that to MP3 and upload it as a media file on my blog.
I have no interest in having the audio hosted elsewhere. That lesson has already been learnt with Play.ht: don’t trust anything other than your own website.
So far, I’ve found that Async.ai works well. The voices sound good and natural, and it feels very similar to what I was using before. I’ve subscribed, and it’s much much cheaper than Play.ht or many of the other options, with a simple pay-per-hour model that suits me perfectly.
My only minor irritation is that when you click Generate and Play, you can’t skip around easily. Every time you fix an error or tweak some grammar, you have to listen to the whole post again. But honestly, that’s a small price to pay for such a straightforward, reliable setup.
If you’re moving away from Play.ht, or just looking for something new to convert long-form text into speech, I’d recommend giving Async.ai a try.