Power QB: Audio Tossup Reader

Packet databases and other quizbowl sites, apps, or software should be discussed here.
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krishayg
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Power QB: Text-to-Speech Tossup Reader

Post by krishayg »

*NEW: Significantly improved text-to-speech quality*

Power QB is now available at powerqb.org!

Power QB is an online text-to-speech quiz bowl tossup reader that works similarly to Buzzword.

Main Features:
- Questions are read aloud with high-quality audio as in a real competition
- Unlimited free questions
- Custom reading speed
- Custom difficulty filtering
- Custom category selection
- No installation required

Questions are selected from the database at qbreader.org and text to speech is used to read the questions aloud.

(Credit to qbreader.org for providing the question database)
Last edited by krishayg on Thu Jul 20, 2023 11:21 pm, edited 4 times in total.
Krishay Garg
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Re: Power QB: Audio Tossup Reader

Post by krishayg »

New feature: You can now select questions by category.
Krishay Garg
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Re: Power QB: Audio Tossup Reader

Post by thedoge »

Looks cool, glad to see that the question database is being put to good use. (Also lets me close a longstanding Github issue heh)
Geoffrey Wu
NNHS '21 | Columbia '25
creator of qbreader.org
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Re: Power QB: Audio Tossup Reader

Post by Dantooine is Big! »

Hey, great project, and I think it has good utility and sounds good. Couple of minor things I noticed, on the front page if you select categories your previous input into the field for "difficulty" disappears. I guess the only other thing that isn't trivial is that I would like to be able to buzz with a spacebar or enter key or some general macro, and I'd like to be able to move to the next question with an enter or something? Not exactly sure what they should be, but maybe use the same macros as qbreader for like skipping questions or pausing? Something to think about. Again, thanks for making this, it's gonna end up stealing a lot of my free time…
Young Fenimore Lee (they/them)
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Re: Power QB: Audio Tossup Reader

Post by Cheynem »

The actual audio part is really good--even the issues where the voice doesn't pronounce things right kind of simulates having a poor reader, which can be useful. I agree with Young Fennimore that having like a "press space to buzz" feature would be good (even more so than qbreader, you're not looking at the screen while this happening in many cases) and ideally some way of just telling the thing to read a packet from a tournament.
Mike Cheyne
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Re: Power QB: Audio Tossup Reader

Post by bosniper »

A better TTS could improve the audio, like TorToiSe. Here's an example:

Audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ydOTLJtBlrDpVFz2Y8xdJNHUMG1cnabK/

Text: "During this presidential election, one candidate sent Anna Chennault to sabotage a diplomatic initiative that would have helped his opponent. In this year’s Democratic primary, some voters shaved their facial hair in an attempt to go “Clean for” the anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy."

(ANSWER: Election of 1968).

It struggles with the emphasis of certain phrases (ex: it underemphasizes the "for" in the phrases "Clean for"), but overall I feel that it's an improvement over older TTS software. It might get better if the AI model powering the TTS was trained on quizbowl questions (maybe Beterword audio?).

The downside of this is that it costs money to generate tossups. A high estimate would be $0.13 per tossup, assuming around 630 characters per tossup and $0.03 per 150 characters (MetaVoice's pricing). Doing the math, 280 tossups per set * $0.13 per tossup * 10 sets = $364, or around $728 if bonuses were also generated.

However, I suspect this could be reduced to perhaps $0.04 per tossup (so 280 * 0.04 * 10 = $112 / $224) if compute time is rented & a TTS is manually setup (or even for "free" if somebody is willing to let their expensive gaming GPU run for a few days generating the audio).

If interest exists and there is a way to pay for the generation, I could build a database for this (or add the audio to PowerQB or QB Reader).
Last edited by bosniper on Sat Mar 25, 2023 2:24 pm, edited 6 times in total.
Bolun Thompson
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Re: Power QB: Audio Tossup Reader

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

yeah can I Get this with the AI joe biden voice for the other gamers out there
Andrew Wang
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Re: Power QB: Audio Tossup Reader

Post by krishayg »

A new and improved version of PowerQB is now available at www.powerqb.org !

New Features:
- Significantly improved text-to-speech that uses AI to provide a more natural sounding experience
- You can now play questions and buzz using the space bar, and submit your answer using the enter key
- Has now migrated to a new server and domain space to provide faster response time

I hope everyone enjoys using this!
Last edited by krishayg on Thu Jul 20, 2023 1:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
Krishay Garg
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Re: Power QB: Audio Tossup Reader

Post by krishayg »

Custom subcategory selection is now available at https://www.powerqb.org.
Krishay Garg
American High School
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