The makers of the Christian meditation app Soultime have announced the development and release of the world’s first-ever audio version of the Bible read in its entirety by an artificial intelligence voice amounting to 100 hours of audible Scripture.
Soultime said in a statement that it “evaluated a range of text-to-speech platforms but found Google’s Wavenet the most natural sounding,” however, because “the Bible text is extremely complex” it had to “work hard to modify the basic reading to create something that both sounded natural and was truly enjoyable to listen to.”
Citing an example, the statement said Wavenet for some reason couldn’t pronounce “for His name’s sake,” as found in the most famous of all Psalms, Psalm 23, according to Premier. The Google platform insisted on saying “for His name’s saké,” like the alcoholic beverage.
“AI readings have some great advantages,” the makers of the Christian app added. “Having developed the initial version, further [Bible reading] versions can be easily produced in different accents, genders or languages. Also as text-to-speech voices improve over time, the readings can be easily updated.”
Founded by London-based Mark Wagner, Soultime is an app for Christian meditation.
“This is not an intellectual process so much as a spiritual and emotional process of trying to understand what it is that our hearts are believing,” Wagner told Premier Christian Radio last year. “To do that, we need a certain amount of calm, a certain amount of peace, we need a certain amount of time.”
Soultime helps believers do that through music, graphics and a series of guided meditations with various themes, including “Jesus carries our anxieties away,” “Freedom with Forgiveness,” and “Exploring the Lord’s Prayer.”
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Anugrah Kumar
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