Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
(claudio.uk)417 points by csantini 4 days ago
417 points by csantini 4 days ago
> On the other, some of my favorite audio books all stood out because the narrator was interpreting the text really well
This (and everything else with AI) isn't saying "you don't need good actors any more". It's saying "if you don't have an audiobook, you can make a mediocre one automatically".
AI (text, images, videos, whatever) doesn't replace the top end, it replaces the entire bottom-to-middle end.
RIP to future top-enders that would normally have started out on the bottom to middle end.
Bingo. AI is going to destroy any pathway for training and accruing experience.
An embalming tech for our dying civilization.
> RIP to future top-enders that would normally have started out on the bottom to middle end.
This stance always reminds me of the Profession, a 1957 novella by Isaac Asimov that depicts pretty much the future where there are only top performers and the ignorant crowd.
Virtually every book I want this for has been around for 70+ years and still no high or low quality audiobook has been produced. How long do I have to wait for those aspiring top-enders before an audiobook can be made available?
I'm super opposed to AI, but I see this as a rare positive. As someone already said, the win here is to have a audiobook where one doesn't yet exist. hell, maybe the tables will turn and the scrubs will do the hard work of discovering which titles are popular with an audience, then the ebook industry can capitalize on AI by hiring voice actors to produce proper titles?
It's common for shows to use big name actors as voices because they draw an audience, nothing will change. Just means a smaller pool of voice actors and they'll mostly be good looking.
Not RIP at all. "Meritocracy" was coined in a book literally warning us about how terrible such a society would be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
The "top-enders" are the privileged who need to have some of their gains for their intelligence redistributed to others. The alternative is "survival of the smartest", which is de-facto what we have today and what Young was trying to warn us about.
By that time, AI will beat the toppest of the top enders. Remember the time Deep Blue barely beat Kasparov? Now no human, or group of humans can beat a chess engine, even one that runs on an iPhone.
AI TTS has been available for quite some time. Tacotron V1 is about 8 years old. I don't think we saw much bottom end replacement.
IMGO(gut opinion), generative AI is a consumption aid, like a strong antacid. It lets us be done with $content quicker, for content = {book, art, noisy_email, coding_task}. There's obvious preconceptions forming among us all from "generative" nomenclature, but lots of surviving usages are rather reductive in relevant useful manners.
Yeah, let us not blame AI. Audible damaged the quality of audiobooks than AI.
I wholeheartedly agree. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Briggs got me hooked on Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I loved "Going Postal".
I know someone who listened Terry Pratchett's "Wachen! Wachen!" audiobook on Spotify while living in Germany for few years. It was so well narrated that he also acquired some peculiarities of local dialects used by specific characters in the book. Locals in Bavaria were quite surprised of a foreigner speaking such language.
Absolutely.
Even on the non-fiction side, the narration for Gleick's The Information adds something.
While I want this tool for all the stuff with no narration, NYT/New Yorker/etc replacing human narrators with AI ones has been so shitty. The human narrators sound good, not just average. They add something. The AI narrators are simply bad.
I agree with you, but also want to point out:
New authors, self-publishers, can't afford tens of thousands of dollars to get an audiobook recorded professionally... This can limit their distribution.
Authors might even choose not to make such version (or lack confidence to record themselves), so AI capable of making a decently passable version would be nice -- something more than reading text blandly. AI in theory could attempt to track the scene and adjust.
Yes, but if the alternative is not having a book, or having to listen to one poorly read (I love Librivox, but there are some books which I just haven't been able to finish because of readers, and many more which were nixed for family vacation travel listening on that account), this may be workable.
There is SSML for speech markup to indicate various characters of speech like whispers, pronunciation, pace, emphasis, etc.
With LLMs proving to be very good at generating code, it may be reasonable to assume they can get good at generating SSML as well.
Not sure if there is a more direct way to channel the interpretation of the tone/context/emotion etc from prose into generated voice qualities.
If we train some models on ebooks along with their professionally produced human-narrated audiobooks, with enough variety and volume of training data, the models might capture the essence of that human-interpretation of written text? Just maybe?
Amazon with its huge collection of Audible + Kindle library -- if it can do this without violating any rights -- has a huge corpus for this. They already have "whispersync" which is a feature that syncs text in a kindle ebook with words in corresponding audible audiobook.
Good points, thank you! I just tested it. While ChatGPT was very good in adding generic (textual) annotations, the result for generating SSML where very poor (lack of voice names, lack of distinction between narrator and character etc).
Probably the results with a model trained for this plus human audit could lead to very good results.
They still wouldn't be high quality. It's just not possible to capture the precise tone of voice in an annotation, and that precision I believe really makes a difference. My experience is that the deeper the narrator understands the text and conveys that understanding, the easier it becomes for me to absorb that information.
Don't end to end trained models already do this to some extent? Like raising the pitch towards a question mark, like a human would.
TortoiseTTS has a few examples under prompt engineering on their demo site: https://nonint.com/static/tortoise_v2_examples.html
That's a bit of basic and random. Some models have the features you describe. From the better models you get a slightly different voice for text in quotes.
But the difference to good audio books is that you have * different voices for the narrator and each character * different emotions and/or speed in certain situations.
I guess you could use a LLM to "understand" and annotate an existing book if there's a markup and then use TTS to create an audio book from it and so automate most of the the process.
Yeah, for accessibility purposes on things that aren't already narrated, this is kind of thing is huge.
that's the thing. it's not just for accessibility. anything not already narrated is a fair target for TTS. i don't have time to sit down and read books. all reading is done on the go, while getting around or doing daily routines at home. i have a small book that i am reading now, which should take a few hours to finish, but in the time i manage to get done reading it i will probably have listened to two or three audio books.
oh, and it's also a boon for those who can't afford to buy audiobooks.
Agree with you on this.
My example, I was never a Wheel of Time fan, but the new audio editions done by Rosamund Pike are quite the performance, and make me like the story. She brings all the characters to life in a way thats different than just reading. It's a true performance.
I guess using different narrators is essential for both fiction and non-fiction books if you want the full experience. Personally, I love it when audiobooks have narrators who stick to the characters’ personalities—it just feels right. Some of the audiobooks I’ve listened to have narrators who switch up their voices for each character, and others even use a different narrator for every character, which gets really good. Narration Box has been doing a really great job with this lately
A couple of my favorite audiobooks are Stranger in a Strange Land and Flowers for Algernon where the performer changes the intonation and enunciation of main character with the character’s journey and it was a revelation and made me appreciate the stories in a way I did not get reading the printed books the first time. Just the consistency of the performance is sometimes difficult to do in my imagination perhaps.
A GenAI model that read audiobooks with such dramatisation is really my dream. There are so many books that I would want to listen to, but still lack such an adaptation. Also it takes months after the book release before the audiobook gets released.
Just imagine what this would do for writers. They can get instant feedback and adjust their book for the audiobook.
I agree but the opposite can be true too. Sometimes the narrator seems to target some general audience that doesn’t fit me at all, in a way that makes me cringe when I listen, until I stop listening altogether. In these cases I’d rather listen to a relatively flat narration from a tool like this.
Would a "better" AI would do a "better" narration with a better understanding of the text? Of course that it would imply a different (and far bigger?) model.
Anyway, even if in theory it might, in practice things may end even worse than doing it with a monotone voice.
On the other hand, there are a lot of narrators who are just bad, and the publisher is not going to pay for an alternate narration. These tools are a good way to re-narrate Wil Wheaton narrated books with correct pronunciation and inflection, for example.
Computer chess took a long time to get better than the best players in the world, but it was better than most chess players for many years before that. We're seeing that a lot with these generative models.
I like one speaker in one particular book.
He also narrates another scifi book series and honestly I dislike this a lot.
He became the voice of one particular character for me.
I would love variety
The quality is great (amazing even), but I can't listen to AI generated voices for more than 1 minute. I don't know why, I just don't like it. I immediately skip the video on youtube if the voice is AI generated.
Might be because our brains try to 'feel' the speaker, the emotion, the pauses, the invisible smile, etc.
No doubt models will improve and will be harder to identify as AI generated, but for now, as with diffusion images, I still notice it and react by just moving on..
That kinda means the quality isn't great or amazing. Good TTS should be nearly or indistinguishable from a human speaker and should include emoting, natural pauses, etc
Haven't really been following the latest in TTS ML, but I expected this to be better or at least as good-bad as the stuff you hear on YouTube. Somehow it sounds worse. It really is jarring to listen to any of these ML voices and can't really stand it. Nope out of every video that uses them and can't tell if YouTube never recommends them to me for that reason, or just because the recommendations around what I watch are just so rarely going to be from some low reputation channel.
Take a moment here for a second though and think about it. Even if these voices got to be really good, indistinguishable almost... would I want to listen to it even then? If it was an NPC's generated voice and generated dialogue in a game to help enrich the world building, maybe in that context. On YouTube or with newscasters? Probably not. Audio books? Think I would still rather have it be a real person, because it's like they're reading a story to me and it feels better if it's coming from someone. There's also the unknown factor, where if it's ML generated it's so sterile that the unknowns are kind of gone.
Think about it like this, in the movie industry we had practical effects that were charming in a way. You could think about the physical things that had to occur to make that happen. Movie magic. Now, everything is so CG it's like the magic is gone. Even though you know people put serious hard work into it, there's a kind of inauthenticity and just lack of relevance to the real world that takes something away from it.
It's like a real magician has interesting tricks, while an artificial magician is most likely just a liar.
Still, I grant that it makes some cool things possible and there is potential if things are done right. Some positive mixture of real humans and machine generated stuff so it isn't devoid of anything connected to real life effort.
For new generations/those coming up now this will be the norm and not generate the negative reaction is does for us, it will just be part of how the world is and has always been, and eventually we will be the minority.
Future generations will never know a world where you don't watch a 2 hour AI generated orientation video about the wonders of working for Generic Corp when you start a new job.
> I immediately skip the video on youtube if the voice is AI generated.
I mean, I do that because it's correlated with the content being garbage. If I'm intentionally using it on content I want to consume I expect it to be different, though I haven't gotten around to trying it properly yet so I guess we'll see. (OTOH I already listen to ebooks via pre-AI TTS, so I'm optimistic)
Among other things, what I don't like is the hallucinated stress. Take the classic example of:
> I never said she stole my money
It can have 7 different meanings based on which word you stress out.
The new AI voices sound very natural at a shallow level, but overall pronounce things in odd ways. Not quite wrong, but subtly unnatural which introduces some cognitive load.
Old TTS systems with their monotonic voices are less confusing, but sound very robotic.
Yeah same.
Doesn't mean the quality is bad. In fact I think Kokoro's quality is amazing.
But it is not the right tool for narration, the kind of training data they use make the sound too flat, if that makes sense.
Can anyone recommend an open source option that would allow training on a custom voice (my own, so I'd be able to record as many snippets as it needed to train on) to allow me to use it for TTS generation without sharing it off my machine?
Edit: I'll wait to see if any recommendations get made here, if not I might give this one a go: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
Coqui is great, but in practice, I found Piper easier to set up, train, and deploy as an ONNX file. Big thanks to the Sherpa development team for their helpful resources: https://k2-fsa.github.io/sherpa/onnx/tts/piper.html and to the Rhasspy team for their training guide: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/blob/master/TRAINING.md.
I also found DEMUCS + Whisper + pydub to be a super helpful combo for creating quality datasets.
There is a fork here https://github.com/idiap/coqui-ai-TTS 'coqui-tts'
Though according to the TTS leaderboard, Fish Speech https://github.com/fishaudio/fish-speech and Kokoro are higher.
I wrote this a while ago about xTTSv2 mixed with Nvidia's Nemo. Maybe it kicks off your journey.
https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/teaching-your-agent-to-speak...
I would love to have an e-reader that allows me to switch between text and audio at the press of a button. Imagine reading your book on the couch and then switching into audio mode while doing the dishes seamlessly, by connecting bluetooth headphones.
Kindles used to provide this feature, but publishers and/or the Authors Guild stopped it, because audio rights and text rights are handled differently. In other words, when Amazon sells you a text book, it does not have the right to then also do TTS on that text and let you listen to it.
There's some contemporary discussion of what happened here: https://tidbits.com/2009/03/02/why-the-kindle-2-should-speak...
I think there is still integration with Audible, though. If you buy a book on the Kindle and on Audible, the position will sync, and you can switch between listening and reading without losing your place in the book.
I am not sure if this still works, but 2-3 years ago I listened to a kindle book that I bought through my Echo show device. It was pretty good. I listened to it while I was cooking. It even allowed you to carry on where you left off. But I did notice that a few pages were skipped as I had read the book before. I have since packed away my echo show so I can't verify if they have removed this feature or not.
I used that TTS feature semi-regularly on a Kindle 2.
It wasn't a good experience but it was nice to be able to keep 'reading' a book while I was exercising.
It worked for me for over a decade, until I broke the device. I don't know if I never updated the firmware or if the fact I used Calibre to convert books bypassed the feature gate.
It is a supported feature in the epub 3.0 standard. It's possible to distribute an epub with audio, and have the audio sync to the HTML elements that form the ebook's text. And there is an e-reader that actually supports this feature, I can't remember which one now but it should be possible to find it with Google.
It's more of an open problem how to create those epubs. I have some code that can do it using Elevenlabs audio, but I imagine it way harder to have something similar for a human narrator.... who's going to do the sync? Maybe we need a sync AI.
You can do it easily with non-DRM books (or DRM stripped books):
For Android:
- Moon+ reader pro - some paid high-quality TTS voices (like Acapella)
For iOS:
- Kybook reader and internal iOS voices (no external TTS voices for the walled garden)
This works well enough to listen to a book while you walk and when you get back home read on the WC from the place you stopped.
Additionally if you buy a tablet or an android ebook reader, you install the app there an you can continue on your bigger/better device seamlessly.
Whisper-sync for the masses! Ahoy...
Literally started doing that this week with Amazon Audible. I gave in an started the three month 99c trial and downloaded the app.
What surprised me a good way was my Kindle app was aware of this and asked if I wanted to download the audible version of the current book I am reading.
Been listening on the way to work and then reading on the way back. Enjoying it so far.
Some Kindke books also have a checkbox to add the audio (for a fee) when you buy it. Sometimes I’ve seen books discounted to e.g. £0.99, but adding the audio might be £5.99. The upsell seems to be a good hack for adding some revenue when there’s a deep discount being used to drive interest.
Boox Ultra Tab whatever the fuck (their product naming sucks) + Readwise Reader = amazing for this
Not quite seamless but it works. It has a cursor that follows the words as they’re spoken to, which allows you to read and hear (“immersive reading”) which I find to be extremely helpful for maintaining focus.
This looks incredible! I’ve had an idea simmering in the back of my mind for a while now: creating an audiobook from an ebook for my commute using the voice of a specific audiobook narrator I really enjoy. The concept struck me after coming across the Infinite Conversation project here on HN. Unfortunately, I just haven’t found the time to bring it to life yet. :(
Made this for my kids for Christmas:
- take an ebook in any language - AI translates it to German - AI speaks it using the voice of their fav narrator - a UI showing the text as it is being read
Now they can read Asimov, Kulansky, Bryson, regardless of whether a translation or audio version exists. :)
What about the copyright issue? You can’t mimic the voice of a narrator without their consent. OpenAI landed in trouble after using Scarlett Johansson’s voice in a demo.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24161253/scarlett-johanss...
No limitations on this kind of thing if you are in private use.
Yeah, by my ear it was pretty clearly not SJ’s voice-likeness, although there were some superficial similarities.
But some people could have mistook it due to some regional accent similarities, though it would be akin to interpretation of any light southern drawl with a similar timbre as being SJ.
The word “kokoro” means “heart” in Japanese, which I learned making the (heart shaped and paperback) puzzle books at https://www.kakurokokoro.com/
Note that kokoro (心) means “heart” in the sense of “spirit,” “soul,” “mind,” “emotions,” etc. It doesn’t mean “heart” in the sense of “internal organ that pumps blood.” That is shinzō (心臓).
I once heard an American friend with so-so Japanese ability ask a Japanese woman who had recently had a heart operation how her kokoro was doing, and she looked surprised and taken aback.
Side note: After I started reading HN in 2019, I was struck by how many tech products mentioned here have Japanese names. I compiled a list for a few years and eventually posted it:
Its also the name of the AI in Terminator Zero https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Kokoro
I'm not sure if that is related here.
I hope a plugin for Calibre ebook management software comes along that makes it easier to convert select titles from your epub library to decent audio versions -- and a decent open source app for tablets and smartphones that can let us seamlessly consume both the ebook and audiobook at will.
I would for sure not want this for fiction, it's too obvious that the voice has no understanding whatsoever of the text, but it's probably pretty nice for converting short news texts or notifications to audio.
Your point is a valid one, but I want to add to it that it is also a matter of expectations and how one listens.
Years ago, when I was dating someone who spoke Russian as one of her native languages, we had to do a funny compromise when watching films together with her parents: they didn't speak a word of English, so we'd use the Russian dub with English subtitles.
I noticed that the Russian dub was just one man reading a translation in a flat voice over what was happening on the screen, no attempts at voice acting or matching the emotions. Usually the dub would have a split second delay to the actual lines, so you'd still hear the original voices for a moment (and also a little bit in the background).
At first I found it very jarring, but they explained that this flatness was a feature. You'll quickly learn to "filter out" the voice while still hearing the translation, and the faint presence of the original voices was enough to bring the emotional flavor back. The lack of voice acting helped with the filtering.
This turned out to apply to me as well, even though I don't speak Russian! My brain subconsciously would filter out the dub, and extract most of the original performance through the subtitles and faint presence of the original voices. Obviously the original version would have been a better experience for me, but it was still very enjoyable.
Of course a generated audiobook is not a dub, as there is no "original voice" to extract an emotional performance from. But some listeners might still be able do something similar. The lack of understanding in the generated voice and its predictable monotony might allow them to filter out everything but the literal text, and then fill it in with their own emotional interpretations. Still not as great as having proper story teller who does understand the text and knows how to deliver dramatic lines, but perhaps not as bad as expected either.
Here is the rest of that story.
When the foreign movies started to filter into the Soviet Union's illegal movie theatres, you would get 3 or 4 movies playing at once in one room. There would be a TV in each corner of the room and 4 or 5 rows of plastic chairs in front of it in an arch.
ALL of the movies were being revoiced by the same person. So, if you were sitting in the back of the 5th row, you were potentially getting the sound from an action movie, a comedy, a horror movie and a romance at the same time. In the same voice.
You learned to filter really well. So, if that's what they were trained on, watching a single movie must have been very relaxing.
Looking at the modern internet experience it sounds like the Soviet Union's illegial movie theatres were ahead of their time!
Watching these as russian/english bilingual is very painful, tho I grew up in western world so maybe I'm just not used to it.
To add on a slight tangent. Many books/audiobooks just don't exist in other languages at all. So even getting some monotone is a lot better than getting nothing.
I think this is where these models really shine. Cheaply creating cross language media and unlocking the knowledge/media to underprivileged parts of the world.
> Watching these as russian/english bilingual is very painful, tho I grew up in western world so maybe I'm just not used to it.
I figured that their opinion probably wasn't universal, hahaha.
And yes, it's at the very least a win for accessibility
indeed, audio books come in many forms, some are rather flat, and some include different voices, even by different speakers, or include a few voiced sound effects, laughing, crying, singing, etc. TTS is extra flat, but if the quality is good otherwise then it is like reading with my ears, and i add the emotions myself.
Audible has thousands of books available "for free" with their membership that are all AI generated. I was the same in the start, but after listening to a few, it really comes down to the voice used. I spent 8h on a plane listening to 1 book, and there was maybe 5 occasions where i had an issue with the voice; and i think all where just "AI weirdness", similar to chat LLMs messing up simple sentence structure or image generating LLMs adding an extra finger.
The one I tried, had a lot of issues. It was a music theory book and it did not know how to pronounce C# (it kept saying C 'hash'). It also referred to, but did not read out the diagrams, or tables.
So, it was not just the voice, but the quality control pipeline that was missing as well.
Maybe it mostly works for old plain text books, but if nobody is checking.....
Finally! Been trying all the TTS models popping up on here for ages, and they've all been pretty average, or not work on Mac, or only work on really short text, or be reeealy slow.
But this one works pretty quick, is easy to install, has some passible voices. Finally I can start listening to those books that have no audio version.
I'm a slow reader, so don't read many books. If a book doesn't have an audiobook version, chances are I won't read it.
PS, I have used elevenlabs in the past for some small TTS projects, but for a full book, it's price prohibitive for personal use. (elevenlabs has some amazing voices)
Thank you to the dev/s who worked on this!
I am having a very similar setup locally, which uses Chrome with the 'Read Aloud' plugin. I am capturing the audio stream via QJackCtl/VLC. Voices, speed, pitch can be adjusted. Efficient and quickly set up
If you look for a lot of the great classics, audiobooks results are inundated with basic TTS "audiobooks" that are impossible to filter out. These are impossible to listen to because they lack the proper intonation marking the end of sentences, making it very tiring to parse. It might be better than tuna can sounding recordings, especially if you want to ear them in traffic (a common requirement), but that's about it. The alternative, if you want real quality recordings, is to stop reading classics and instead read latest Japanime Isekai of murder mystery, these have very good options on the market. Anyway, I don't think it needs more justification that it covers a good niche usage.
I'm checking what the actual quality is (not a cherry-picked example), but:
Started at: 13:20:04 Total characters: 264,081 Total words: 41548 Reading chapter 1 (197,687 characters)...
That's 1h30 ago, there's no kind of progress notification of any kind, so I'm hoping it will finish sometime. It's using 100% of all available CPUs so it's quite a bother. (this is "tale of a tub" by Swift, it's about half of a typical novel length)
It's not in one Chapter, but Chapters are called "Section" (and so ignored!). It should be simple to have a dictionary of the different units that are used (I would assume "Part" would fail too, as would the hilarious "Catpter" of some cat-themed kid book, but that's more complicated I guess?).
It did finish and result is basically as good as the provided example, so I'd say quite good! I'll plan to process some book before going to bed next time!
Chapter 1 read in 6033.30 seconds (33 characters per second)
I really liked it and added a variable speed argument: https://github.com/santinic/audiblez/pull/4
For accessibility I think this is a great thing, but as entertainment less so.
Example is Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the narrator Rob Inglis, makes an amazing voice performance giving depth to environments and characters. And of course the songs!
The page says it was trained on under 100 hours of audio. Then, the link says “we employ large pre-trained SLMs, such as WavLM, as discriminators with our novel differentiable duration modeling for end-to-end training.” I don’t have time to read the paper to see what that means.
Depending on what that means, it might be more accurate to say it was trained on 100 hours of audio and with the aid of another, pre-trained model. The reader who thinks “only 100 hours?!” will know to look at the pretraining requirements of the other model, too.
I think the saddest thing is that it's highly likely that real people will start to produce aesthetics that look/sound/etc like AI slop
What about the WASM running sherpa-onnx? No intallation required and can be served locally as well.
https://k2-fsa-web-assembly-tts-sherpa-onnx-en.static.hf.spa...
You might need to install/setup Speech Dispatcher. I was just using this implementation with Piper: https://github.com/Elleo/pied?tab=readme-ov-file.
However easier way to read articles aloud is with Read Aloud extension: https://github.com/ken107/read-aloud.
Cars also have legs while audio doesn't, a point which is equally irrelevant. If people don't need to read, they don't need to read, and no matter how much a random Internet commenter wants them to need it, it won't change anything.
Skills atrophy for a reason. It's fine to let them. You may as well be lamenting the lost art of long division.
You can multitask with audio content, so you can consume content when you can't sit down to read. And you can even potentially consume more volume like on a long daily commute.
It's not the case that it's worse.
It sounds okay, but it lacks emotion and is monotone for fiction, it's the voice equivalent of the uncanny valley, which is probably fine if you don't really care.
This is wonderful, and so happy to see the post where the author ran it locally on their Macbook.
I am curious, is there an equivalent light model for speech to text, that can run real-time on the MacBook? I'm just playing around with AI models and was looking into this (a fully locally running app that lets you talk to your computer).
There is also this TTS: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper that is pretty good (depending on the language) and extremely fast, would be cool to change the script to user Piper instead of Kokoro in case you want to use a language that is not supported by Kokoro or it's too slow, Piper supports a lot of them.
Has anyone gotten this working on windows? No matter where I put the files Powershell insists that kokoro-v0_19.onnx and voices.json aren't in the current folder.
Not directly related to the software, but interestingly on the authors website there is a Schedule a free call with me (https://claudio.uk/templates/call.html). I wonder if randos on the internet ever do that, and how it works out.
I've been doing it for a few years (+200 calls) and have met a ton of wonderful people this way.
What I really want and hope that someone does is to make an audiobook service that converts books to audiobooks but so that each character has own voice.
Som audiobooks have this and I think it really makes the experience much more engaging.
(Also maybe some background sound effects but not sure about that, some books also have this and it's quite nice too)
I’m sure they sound more natural, but honestly, the text to speech built into my Kindle more than 10 years ago was good enough. Of course, Amazon killed that off because it would cannibalise sales to Audible.
Very nice! I fiddled with this idea a few months back but the models available at the time were woefully slow on a macbook. Will definitely give this a spin, there's a large category of web serials and less popular translated novels that never get audiobook releases.
I want to be able to seemlessly read on my ebook reader and then put in my headphones and go for a walk with the dog and resume on audio where I left off. then when I come back, my ereader is at the right place where the audio finished and I can resume reading
Readwise Reader does this. A litttttle finicky at tracking read location but it’s workable
All these AI text to voice models seem to ignore emotion. It always sounds like a robot.
I wonder if AI could create a "commentary" script that instructs the TTS how to read certain words or chapters. The commentary would be like an additional meta-track to help the TTS make the best reading.
That should actually be possible to do already with existing tech. I haven't seen if you can instruct Kokoro to read in a certain way, does anyone know if this is possible?
Try this one https://www.hume.ai/ - I found the demos (voice to voice) interesting.
Like with almost everything, its an active area of research:
https://emosphere-tts.github.io/
We are getting there
Markdown and PDF would also be cool. I think it's just a case of feeding the TTS model the right data at the right time. The special sauce is in the model, there's really not much to the code: https://github.com/santinic/audiblez/blob/main/audiblez.py
I have been looking for something credible that can voice over written emails (long form ones), documents and powerpoints locally ...this might be just the thing!
It is essentially a set of voice models building on https://huggingface.co/spaces/styletts2/styletts2
The odd thing is that while they are releasing these great sounding models, they are not documenting the training process. What we want to know is what magic if any allowed them to create such wonderful voices...
Why isn't the audiobook market strong enough that it would make business sense to pay good narrators and actors for each book published?
Do folks have a preferred toolkit for extracting text from web articles? I’d like to TTS articles friends send me.
This one sounds a bit robotic and takes ~4 hours per book on my M1 laptop, so I'll keep looking. For now, I'm happy my current method - EPUBReader browser extension, which opens .epub as an HTML page in Microsoft Edge browser, which has a "Read Aloud" button set to the Stephan natural voice at 1.6 speed. Best sounding voice I've ever heard, speaks fast, clear, crisp, with natural inflections to the sentences, and if I want to jump to somewhere I just left click the text at that spot. And it's instant - no conversions. Downside is I have to stay in bluetooth range of my laptop, so I'm still looking for a good phone based method. Google Play Books works okay, but gets buggy at 1.6 speed.
Just tried it, and "meh"...
It's one step above "normal" text-to-speech solutions, but not much above it. The epub has "Chapter 1" as the title on the page, and a lot of whitespace, and then "This was...." (actual text). The software somehow managed to ignore all the whitespace and reach "chapter 1 this was.." as a single sentance, no pauses, no nothing.
Blind? A great tool. Will it replace actual audiobooks? Well.. not yet at least.
There's another project called ebook2audiobook that has produces some decent results.
in case you are wondering how audiblez becomes an executable in the PATH from a pip install audiblez per the documentation
... audiblez book.epub -l en-gb -v af_sky.
it does not, instead it installs a python package with a cli interface, to run you then have to prepend python and load the module like this:
python3 -m audiblez book.epub -l en-gb -v af_sky.
Because people will opt for readily-available free trash instead of paying for high quality. And then that quality isn't available to anyone at any price, so everyone loses.
If you haven't observed this in many other markets, you live an unusual (or unobservant) life.
For anyone looking for an easier alternative (and one without the bugs the author describes, such as skipping some prefaces or failing to detect some chapters), Voice Dream Reader on iOS (and macOS) handles .epub and other e-books just fine and supports a variety of built-in and external voices.
There are many apps. Voice Dream isn't up to date with voice quality (which was amazing 10 years ago when it started, but now even Apple gives you voices of similar quality for free), but is up to date with prices.
Here is a detailed comparison chart I have made that tracks over 100 features across most popular apps: https://speechcentral.net/speech-central-vs-voice-dream-read...
Yes, I’ve used Voice Dream for years with Pocket articles & ebooks because the Pocket app took up too much space and was limited to web articles. The voice quality is ok for short pieces or stints. The choice of voices is a bit robotic, but I find it useful while making written notes in Split View.
It is free at the moment. They clearly specify in their terms that it won't be completely free in the future. The price of their same product if accessed from the web is $100/month for the amount (barely) sufficient for book reading. It may be smarter to skip until they reveal their official pricing for the mobile app.
Unless something has changed, the iOS version is a one-time purchase. I bought the app many years ago (8?) and have been a happy user since.
Like you, though, I had that reaction to the subscription model for macOS and therefore decided not to "buy" it when it came out.
They got greedy and decided to milk it. That's what changed.
It's $80/yr for the iOS app.
Oof, I believe they changed ownership so I must have been grandfathered in. That's steep.
On the one hand, this is very convenient. Probably cool for some non-fiction.
On the other, some of my favorite audio books all stood out because the narrator was interpreting the text really well, for example by changing the pacing during chaotic moments. Or those audiobooks with multiple narrators and different voices for each character. Not to mention that sometimes the only cue you get for who's speaking during dialogue is how the voice actor changes their tone. I have mixed feelings about using this and losing some of that quality.
I would totally use this over amateur ebooks or public domain audiobooks like the ones on project guttenberg. As cool as it is/was for someone to contribute to free books... as a listener it was always jarring to switch to a new chapter and hear a completely different voice and microphone quality for no reason.