So, I wanted to like this, but frankly the quality isn't fantastic.<p>The text to speech is alright, but it lacks almost any emotion, and it reads everything literally, which when the article/pdf has a weird layout, or has figures, doesn't sound natural. Though I expect they're just not using their top-of-the-line models for this - I've had much more luck pushing a pdf through Claude to generate the "verbal version" (which is mostly literal, but also describes the layout and figures) and then the result through the top-of-the-line ElevenLabs model.<p>Now, I've also checked out the podcast feature, and it's pretty clear they first do a textual generation, and then a simple text to speech. Again, lack of emotion, very mechanical flow.<p>I made a podcast of a technical article[0] in both ElevenLabs reader and Google's NotebookLM, and the NotebookLM podcast is a night-and-day improvement - maybe they use a better model, maybe they use straight "article to podcast" end-to-end multimodal generation, I don't know, but the quality, flow, emotion, is just on a completely different level. I had to quickly turn off the ElevenLabs-generated podcast cause I couldn't keep listening to it, while NotebookLM's one is legitimately enjoyable.<p>Now to finish on a more positive note, fingers crossed for the ElevenLabs team improving this, and us getting some competition in the area of article-to-audio, both podcast-style, and direct! I think, in general, it's a very promising product direction. Feature-wise, I would also love to get a daily overview podcast based on all my RSS feed articles for a given day.<p>[0]: <a href="https://huggingface.co/blog/modernbert" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/blog/modernbert</a>