I've finally done something that I've wanted to do for a while, and I'm so happy with how it turned out.
Eleven Labs
I bought a subscription to this AI voice generating tool. By all accounts, they're one of the best on the market, but for me the price didn't seem too great so I shopped around a fair bit.
But, all of the looking around led me back Eleven Labs. For €27 a months you're given 100,000 credits, 1 credit is one character, and one of the stories I created was somewhere in the region of 22,000 characters.
I thought that would translate to about 10-15 minutes of audio, but in fact, it was 28 minutes, which is pretty cool.
Roughly 1 month should allow me to produce 5-7 short stories, which I have some decent plans for.
The best thing about Eleven Labs is that you can generate an entire audiobook narrated by one person, but pre-program numerous dialogue tags with different voices, to give it more of a radio-play feel.
The Plan
I'm going to upload these short stories to social media as 2-3 minutes segments, and then when the final part releases, I'll upload the uninterrupted one to YouTube.
But, with the audio, my dad said he'd take a look at it and put some ambient sounds, music, and maybe some sound effects in, which will take the whole thing to the next level.
I have some plans for creating imagery, but for the time being I'm just going to produce some AI artwork, because my idea will take time, and I'd rather just get this started sooner rather than later.
Credit Restraint
I find the time constraint a bit annoying, but in a way it's a bit of a blessing - if I were to try and look at it positively.
5-7 audio files per month means that I'll have to make sure at least that many are ready to go before the credits run out, and then have more ready to go in time for them to reset. Which means I'll produce these things as fast as I can, to ensure I make the most out of what I have available.
All in all, I do wish there was a bit more leeway, but at the same time, it's okay as is. At least for now.
The first story does have a few hammy moments due to the ai voices, but that's sort of the charm when it comes to them, and apart from those little moments and inconsistencies, it's actually fairly decent.