Narration Box

What's new in the latest update?

We have made some serious improvements to the speech editor in this update (All thanks to your consistent feedback). And we have added a super helpful thing, too.

1️⃣ You can now fetch text from a URL in your speech editor.

The Fetch from URL button will let you get text from a news site or a blog making it easier to convert your content to audio on the go.

https://www.loom.com/share/013b7385c4584fc3a4e5a4e237994d5e

2️⃣ If an effect is not available for the selected narrator, it will be disabled by default.

Many of our users pointed out that if an effect is not available with the narrator, it didn't tell that right away and the effect button had to be clicked just to learn that. We removed that extra step and the button is disabled by default now if the effect is not supported by the narrator.

https://www.loom.com/share/366fe3fd4970415191e83c8086669756

3️⃣ We also added a little volume controller for the dialogue exclusively.

Minor UI sugar. Now no more loud booming dialogue testing.

https://www.loom.com/share/0289cb9ee79143fd88df5b9cd73ba84d

4️⃣ Applying any effect will now reset the dialogue testing audio.

A few of our users pointed out that if you are testing a dialogue's audio and you decide to apply an effect, the audio would not stop playing and it would also not reset which turned out to be pretty annoying. That bug is gone too.

https://www.loom.com/share/1acd5792947949689c0dead86f8f52c5

What are some other features you want us to ship other than what we are shipping (A surprise coming soon 🎉)? Feel free to reply to this post or join our discord community(https://discord.com/invite/Qjtx8cbmdG)

Here is the audio version of this story if you think text sucks 😀
https://narrationbox.com/narration/329/

Narration Box (narrationbox.com) started as a side project of my cofounder's while we were working on our previous startup KloudTrader (kloudtrader.com). It was initially just an ebook to audiobook conversion service with aws polly voices. Hacker news loved it because nothing of that sort was available at that time (other services still kind of suck) and people were able to listen to the most niche of audiobooks. Then one day we had to make tutorials for KloudTrader. We sat down to record voiceovers for the tutorials but we realised we sucked at it. We were not making enough money to hire professional narrators or voiceover artists and all the text to speech services were bland as hell. This is when we realised the need of Narration Box. Our first pitch was "Create narrations and voiceovers as quickly as possible". I agree that AI voices are still far away from imitating a human narrator but not everyone needs a human narrator. As we moved forward, we realised the rapid shift in the audio only space and the pace at it which it was disrupting basically every vertical. Every year more people listen to audiobooks, podcasts, narrations, etc from the last year and more and more people are switching to audio only approach because let's be real "Text is just not enough, video is way too much but audio is just enough". Surprisingly, the whole of audio market is built upon this statement. Thus, we have now found a newer vision for our company(although on the same lines) of creating tools for the audio creator economy be it B2B and B2C. You can already create audiobooks and narrations and voiceovers using Narration Box but soon, you will be able to add audio widgets to your sites and blogs, monetise the content you create, do both basic and complex audio editing online making it a swiss army knife for audio creators and companies who want to up their audio game.
Would love to hear your guys' feedback on this and give narrationbox.com a try if you can.