Velleius - Epicurus On The True Nature Of Divinity - New Home Page Video

Today we're introducing the second new home page attraction - a media presentation of Velleius' speech explaining Epicurus' view of divinity from Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods. I'll repeat what I said about the current state of both this and the other text-to-speech production:

1. This audio voice is far from perfect. {Actually, I think this one is better than the Torquatus version, for some strange reason, as they were produced in the same way.) Much effort has been put into this version, but the AI voice has a long way to go, so lower your expectations. We want the best, but we also want to reach as many people with this information as possible. If we wait for perfection, some will miss having this available to him that might otherwise see it.
2. The text is adapted from the same versions that we already have on the website, but it needs to be improved. i will be placing this text on "Github," a public site where text can be edited in a collaborative manner. I will appreciate submissions for corrections and will get them up as soon as possible. Again, the tradeoff here is that if we wait for perfection before we publish this, some will miss it who might otherwise profit from it.
3. One merit of this audio voice is that it is entirely in the public domain. We can continue to work on improving it and distribute this with no copyright concerns whatsoever.
4. It will be desirable to add graphics throughout the video to illustrate the text. That will be a huge task , and suggestions on how to do that will be appreciated.
5. As this text is not copyrighted, anyone who wants to proceed on their own to produce a better version is welcome to do so. Our goal is to promote the philosophy of Epicurus with the best material available, not to promote the graphics skill of me (which are obviously poor) or of anyone else.
6. Check THIS POST for more technical info.
7. We will be regularly updating this to improve the text and presentation quality. One side effect of that, however, is that it is not possible to proofread a new version, without watching the whole thing. That means regression errors may creep into another part of the file as a result of editing an existing error. Please feel free to report any and all errors anytime you observe one, as we may not already be aware of it for this reason.

Thanks for the input Steve, It's my intent to lower expectations to reduce disappointment, but yes it's already much better than the older TTS i used some years ago. And it's just going to get better over time. In the meantime, as we listen to this one, I am hoping we can catch significant errors or questionable word choices in the text so that the text part gets better over time too.

And it's also relevant that I am targeting this for easy access by "newcomers" who want an introduciton perhaps while they are driving or have time to listen to something rather than sitting down to pore through a book.