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I'm most interested in its potential for audiobooks, especially of the vast array of old and less-common books that don't have human-made audiobook equivalents.
by DanAndersen 9y ago
I'm most interested in its potential for audiobooks, especially of the vast array of old and less-common books that don't have human-made audiobook equivalents. I find myself constrained by the limits of audiobook choices, which tends toward best-sellers lists or pop-sci. Current attempts to use text-to-speech to generate audiobooks results in something that's frankly unlistenable. If TTS could get to a "good enough" point for audiobooks, that would open up a huge range of less-common content.
- michael_h 9y agoThis was kind of the target of the 2016 Blizzard Challenge (http://festvox.org/blizzard/blizzard2016.html http://festvox.org/blizzard/blizzard2016.html), as the training data was children's books (clean audio, 'reading voice' prosody, etc). Some of the voices that came out of that were incredible.
- exhilaration 9y agoOne of my co-workers told me in 2012 that he was doing exactly this. He used an ebook reader to download free ebooks from Gutenberg and then the IVONA text to speech engine for Android to listen to them on his drives. He had already finished a few classics like Treasure Island this way. I'm sure things have improved significantly since 2012 so what you're looking for is probably easily done.
- degenerate 9y agoIf your co-worker could share how he did this, it would be appreciated (specifically, what apps/code needs to be run).
- thorum 9y agoNot the coworker, but I've been doing this for a couple years. If you're on iOS, the simplest option is Voice Dream Reader [1]. It can read .epub files directly, along with text files and webpages, and integrates with Dropbox, Pocket, Gutenberg, etc. On Android, you can get Voice Dream Reader (though it has less features than on iOS) or @Voice Aloud Reader which is free [2]. [1] http://www.voicedream.com/reader/ http://www.voicedream.com/reader/ [2] http://www.hyperionics.com/atVoice/ http://www.hyperionics.com/atVoice/
- woodson 9y agoIt also works reasonably well for academic papers as PDF. Equations get butchered, of course, but overall it's not bad (you can set PDF margins so that headers/footers are not read out aloud on every page). I use it to proof-read my own writing, it helps you spot things that spelling/grammer checkers miss.
- exhilaration 9y agoFor Android take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAHg31ucDhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAHg31ucDhY
- sangnoir 9y agoI have been doing this on Android for a few years using Ivona, FBReader with the FBReader TTS+ Plugin. I got Ivona (beta) from the Play Store before they were bought by Amazon - it looks like Ivona voices have since been pulled and are no longer available.
- mtgx 9y agoGoogle's "cloud-based" TTS (not the local one, which was terrible) on the Play Books app was pretty good even years ago. However, it was unusable because it would stop as soon as the screen would turn-off. Other ebook readers' read-aloud features worked with the screen off. So thanks for nothing Google!
- nicklovescode 9y agoI don't have time at the moment to search it out, but in a previous speech-synth thread there's an in depth discussion of this. In short, people were pessimistic on wavenet as audiobook because audiobooks are all about knowing the story and speaking accordingly
- ThomPete 9y agoBut it will only get better and if humans can learn it...
- nicklovescode 9y agoI didn't say I was pessimistic on it :)
- supermdguy 9y agoFor old books, I've liked https://www.librivox.org/ https://www.librivox.org/, which has free recordings of public domain books read by volunteers.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- devindotcom 9y agoYeah, I was thinking about exactly this. I'm actually going to try to reach out to the team to see if they're going to be looking into this. Google Books on the rise! Hopefully! Also music generation - the original post (September of last year) had some really interesting music created by training the system on Chopin or something.
- justonepost 9y agoLove this for company documents as well on my commute.
- jtsiskin 9y agoYou should check out https://getspeechify.com/ https://getspeechify.com/ - I use it all the time for exactly this. It also has a great team behind it
- mark_l_watson 9y agoWow, hadn’t thought about that possibility. Too bad for professional narrators of Audible (and other) audio books. I am a happy customer of Audible, and have some favorite narrators. Sad to think that they will lose work. I am the tech manager for a machine learning team and potentially eliminating jobs is the bad side of my field. That said, I think AI, in some sense of the term, will also help us be more efficient. I imagine everyone having effective assistants that help us in our work, help with communications and scheduling, etc.
- Immortalin 9y agoShameless Plug: https://auditus.cc https://auditus.cc Uses Amazon Polly for the speech gen
- DanAndersen 9y agoNeat! I'll have to look into this.
- dingle_thunk 9y agoI've used "Voice Dream" for this for years. It's brilliant. iOS/Android text to speech app: http://www.voicedream.com/reader/ http://www.voicedream.com/reader/ It has so many voices available in the voice store, and I've had no trouble reading books with it. I'm constantly amazed by the quality of some of these voices when played at high speed... They take breaths, express emotion, everything. My only problem is they occasionally mispronounce brands, names & acronyms: Quite amusing to learn about "Sharr-E-poynt" instead of "SharePoint", "Amd" not "A.M.D", or use an incorrect pronunciation of a character in a book when talking about the book... Can't really see how WaveNet would fix that, but look forward to seeing these voices turn up in Voice Dream.
- mavhc 9y agoTried the 3 demos they linked to, the new Google one is so much better, let's hope they follow suite and improve
- j_s 9y agoAncient Kindle Keyboard can text-to-speech most Amazon ebooks with zero hassle (I think authors can disable it). 'Unlistenable' is in the ear of the beholder! My only gripe personally is having a single "narrator" for all content.
- riffraff 9y agoI agree "unlistenable" is a personal judgement, but there are very rare cases when buying an audiobook, even with a terrible reader, is not a better value/cost ratio than the original Kindle TTS, it was convenient, but not great.