I am always so fascinated by people who can understand VoiceOver at higher speech rates.
I want to hear from those who had their speaking rate at a certain setting for a while but then worked their way up. How did you do that? How long did it take you to adjust?
I was at 70 percent for a while with Eloquence, and trying to train myself to get to 75 because I'm convinced I could get more done faster if it's talking faster. I can understand it, but there are times it does get overwhelming.
I love these types of questions because I find it interesting how we all process things differently in terms of auditory processing.
Let's see what answers I get!
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Always have it 60 or 55%. Same with audiobooks, I know some people like it fast but for me I like the voice to be normal. Alicia, for me it would be like playing a song faster speed. FYI, did you know that the last 3 letter of your name is CIA? Long live cats.
With Holger here
Mine is at 60 was 57% then at the start of 26.0 there was a bug that prevented you from choosing anything not in steps of 5. That is now fixed but never changed it back. Personally, I just prefer normal speeds as I think very fast voices make me want to breathe for them lol.
Eloquence at 70% for me.
Some other synths are faster, but it's probably around the same rate. The big people I hear pushing speed for supposed efficiency are mostly coders, so far as I can tell. On the one hand, I get it, sort of. OTOH, as speech gets faster, it gets choppier and more clipped. It's just tiring to listen to. I'm sure I could do it, but I just don't see the point. I don't have anything that I need to get done right the hell now where a second or two saved from faster speech is going to make the difference.
In general though, you just boost it as minimally as possible, and deal with that, get used to it, then do it again, and again. That's what I remember doing when I started using speech back in the 80s and that's what people who have it cranked up insanely fast say they did to get there. Oh back to who uses it, I think some musicians do too. But I just scroll through or hit control to silence it or do whatever, if I know I'm on the option I want. Again, having it faster makes it choppier, and since I haven't gotten used to it, it ultimately slows me down because I'm just spending more time processing what the thing said.
I do listen to some podcasts and Youtube videos at faster speeds, but audio books only if the narrator is incredibly slow. The stuff I listen to faster I tend to vary the rate with, so though it's faster, it doesn't sound unnatural as a voice, you can just tell it's faster, if that makes sense. Again, it's that clipping I think, that hits a point where it just sounds really not human to me, and that's what I don't like.
Agree with Holger
I too like voiceover to sound natural and not crazy fast. Also agree, long live cats and German Shepherd guides!
I never put my speaking rate past 50%
I never put the voice over speaking right past 50% as my brain can’t process the speech any faster. I’ve tried it once just to see what it would sound like faster and it just sounded like a bunch of noise. It didn’t even sound like intelligible words. So I’m putting it back to 15. I’ve never changed it since. In the same thing when using jaws, I don’t put the speech fast on that either. I want my synthesize speech to still sound at the rate of normal human speech. I can’t process faster, speaking rights. I really don’t even change the picture of the voices either. I just give them other default levels. I think our brain is just all process things differently. Anytime I’ve heard of anybody crank up their synthesize speech really fast I can’t understand it at all so I just don’t do it, but I think the way that people have gotten used to that is that you gradually increase the speed it’s something you can’t do quickly. You have to put the numbers gradually for your brain to process that and then as you get used to that, you keep speeding it as far as you want. That’s what I’ve heard from people that I’ve done it. I’ve been using synthesize speech on my life, but I have never been able to put it faster and I think that’s OK. That’s why they have different rates.
I'm using Jamie at 70%
Hi,
I'm using the Jamie voice, at 70%, as I type.
It's very stable, unlike Eloquence, which is my preference, with Reed being my favorite voice, but for some unknown reason, it keeps silently crashing.
More often than not, I have to restart Voiceover by triple pressing the side button & even then, sometimes, I have to do that multiple times, to get Voiceover to restart, which is why when 26.5 is released next week, I plan to completely restore my phone.
Team fast speech
Fascinating topic!
I have Eloquence at 70%, but sometimes switch back to Samantha compact which is a bit slower, so I turn that up to 80%.
I also speed up my audio books in BARD by about 50%, unless it's a book read by the author and I want to hear their natural speaking voice.
Whenever people ask me how I understand it or if it's even speaking English, I just say "years of practice," and then make a joke about how it's ironic that the only people who can understand the "fine print" in car adds on the radio where they speed up the narrator, is a blind person. lol
My preference.
I prefer it to be at 65 percent. That's the perfect speed for me. Any faster and I miss things that it says and I have to have it repeat. Plus that's fast enough to where other people can't understand what it's saying, if someone is evesdropping.