20 ms·

Apple Books digital narration

300 points by alienreborn 4y ago

theshrike79 4y ago
The OG Kindle with keyboard used to have text to speech too. It was killed by publishers who wanted to charge separately for audiobooks. If Apple has somehow managed to get the licensing for this, I might consider buying from Apple Books in the future.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  licensing as in?
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    License/copyright for written form of book is different than the read form. Author might sell the book rights to company X and audiobook rights to company Y. Company X can't do a text to speech version of their book without infringing on Y. Y cant do speech to text of their version without angering X. Licenses are fun!
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  The product is actually directed at authors, offering them to have an Audiobook produced which is "digitally narrated by Apple Books". The Author still needs to hold the rights for Audiobook production, and he needs to license a third party to produce an Audiobook (no matter if human or "digitally" narrated). I guess that's why this is aimed at "independent Authors", to circumvent negotiating Apple's rev.share and exclusivity for that production with established publishers...
- carlob 4y ago
  You are never buying from Apple Books, it's the usual DRMed crap, more like a rental. Amazon had gotten a lot of flak, buy Apple is not any better in this respect...
  - criddell 4y ago
    Most Apple and Amazon Books are DRM encumbered, but not all. AFAIK, there isn’t a way to tell before you buy the book except by choosing books from publishers that don’t use DRM on any of their titles.
  - ezfe 4y ago
    If DRM works offline, it's not a rental. It's not desirable, but don't call it a rental, that just moves focus away from what the real problems are here.
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      Even if it works offline, it probably won't continue to work if you need to switch to a new device after their DRM servers are turned off. DRMed content can never truly be purchased.
- shrx 4y ago
  > It was killed by publishers who wanted to charge separately for audiobooks. Any sources on this?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bentley 4y ago
    Amazon decides Kindle speech isn’t worth copyright fight (2009) — https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/03/amazon-backs-off-on-kindles-text-to-speech/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/03/amazon-backs-off-on-... See also the recent lawsuit covering the other direction, automatic transcription of Audible books. https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-owned-audible-major-publishers-settle-lawsuit-audiobook-translation-feature/ https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-owned-audible-major-pub...
    - shrx 4y ago
      Thanks. I never really used Kindle Speech on my 3G Kindle, but was curious why it was suddenly gone in later versions.
walterbell 4y ago
Good to see mainstream accessibility work on high-quality text to speech. On iOS/macOS, VoiceDream has offered flexible apps with voices in multiple languages and accents since 2012, e.g. for reading PDFs, web, non-DRM ePub books and scanned text, https://www.voicedream.com/about/ https://www.voicedream.com/about/.
lvl102 4y ago
I am surprised it’s taking so long for big tech companies to roll this out. I suppose there’s too much money in audiobooks? Perhaps licensing issues? If anyone can get a “celebrity reads aloud” feature that would be Apple and that could be big.
- hxugufjfjf 4y ago
  I cannot put into words how much I want Silmarillion read by Scarlett Johansson.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  Yes, licensing. Narrated books are a separate publishing license, with its own production-cost model. So a tech.company like Apple already having rights to sell the written words is still not licensed to publish a narrated version. To sell an Audiobook, they have to acquire the license for a separate product, which so far includes the produced Audiobook itself. It seems Apple is trying to get the audiobook license directly from those authors who didn't sign the license away yet, undercutting production cost for the Audiobook with "digital narration" and then earning more money per sale... I guess we're going to see human narration die very fast now, at least for some common languages, and tech.companies want to ensure that they can split license from production cost, instead of being forced to buy the "whole" Audiobook...
  - karmasimida 4y ago
    TBH it will depend on how those narrations turn out to be. Cherr-picking is easy, but I paid for this, it needs to be human quality throughout
    - rickdeckard 4y ago
      True, but I expect the critical mass of the target group will remain to be people frequently listening to Audiobooks --> Those people are more-likely subscribed to an Audiobook service --> are not paying a per-audiobook price but a flat-fee --> The flat-fee for the whole catalog is lower than buying one audiobook. I would expect this target-group to access a mix of human and digitally narrated books during the transition to digital narration, with best-selling books still being narrated by humans. Users may then complain about the quality of the digital narration, but will keep using such services as the price-expectation is now set. --> A competition for better digital narration engines will likely drive evolution of the engine and authoring tools, further increasing the pressure of publishers to justify the bottom-line of per-book Audiobook production costs. > Cherry-picking is easy, but I paid for this, it needs to be human quality throughout That's a really interesting aspect. If the Audiobook delivers the content with a human voice but still not engaging enough, how many listeners would put the blame on the narration rather than the book itself... ("I like this new song of Metallica, but I don't like how they sing it")
bongobingo1 4y ago
Will we see this level of voice synthesis in the public domain? Maybe I am out of touch but I found those examples very impressive - more impressive than the jobs vs rogan demo a few months back. But I am also saddened at a future where all this is locked up in corporate hands - obviously there is money needed and (licensed) data needed too which Apple can get at. Honestly I would rather eschew the ethics of it and just consume any and all voice data (youtube, podcasts, existing audiobooks, radio) that has transcripts available, perhaps because I assume corpos are already doing this, if it means we can have a free and open data model that people can run at home, maybe that makes me evil.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  My guess is that such "digital narration" is on the brink of becoming available as a service to authors and publishers, with Amazon and Apple trying to get ahead of it by selling a product that can only be published on their platforms then. They are surely able to undercut human narration, but even on digital narration they have an unfair advantage of earning a share on every sale as well. Will be interesting to see how this develops. Either independent digital narration becomes competitive enough that a publisher simply gets it done once and then sells it on all platforms, or this new platform-exclusive model is so disruptive that it becomes even less economic to produce a Audiobook, effectively making Audiobooks exclusive to Apple and Amazon/Audible (and whoever else has such a digital narration engine).
  - patentatt 4y ago
    I'm curious what the economics are here, because getting someone to just read a book can't possibly be that expensive, right? I'm not talking celebrity voice-over work, but just getting anybody with a passable voice to sit down a spend a day or so reading a book into a microphone? Does that really cost that much more than having someone sit down a listen to the whole AI-generated audio book to do QA? And then there's all of the engineers who have to work on the project, the hardware to run all of it, etc. Seems like if it takes months to do and has to be QA'd anyways, it can't be that much more cost effective. Now, if it's completely computer-generated and can be a push-button feature? Sure, that makes sense. I wonder how close they are to that.
csande17 4y ago
The "Helena" sample contains a pretty good test case of this system's ability to guess where emphasis and pauses go: > I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild. (I checked in an online sample of the ebook: there is no punctuation in this sentence.) Unfortunately the AI completely faceplants, placing an enormous pause right in the middle of the phrase "all places wild". It actually changes the meaning of the text, making it sound more like "...the beauty he saw in all places. Wild!" I wonder if any of these AI speech synthesis tools come with an editing tool that you could use to tell it not to put the pause there.
- m_eiman 4y ago
  I'm guessing that the main reason they require you to go through their "preferred partners" is that their job is to insert annontations that the speech generator needs to make it sound good. I wonder if this is because it's difficult work, or if the tools aren't user friendly enough to put in the hands of untrained users. If it's the latter I suppose that sooner or later we won't need to go through the partners.
  - csande17 4y ago
    The sample is taken from a full audiobook that is currently available for sale, so you'd think they would've put an annotation on "all places wild" if they had that ability.
- cprecioso 4y ago
  I guess this is more of a case of garbage in - garbage out. The original sentence itself is not well-structured. But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. I don't feel like this is a product for carefully producing audiobooks, but to create them by the pound, so to speak. I'd say it's a move for the "make your own business through audiobooks" people [1] -- very strange for Apple. [1]: I didn't know this audience existed until I saw this video on it (and the cons that happen) from Dan Olson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
"Digitally narrated titles are a valuable complement to professionally narrated audiobooks" Yeah, right. What a lame attempt to deflect the (fully warranted) criticism that this will put audiobook narrators out of work.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  I think the cat is already out of the bag, and the death of human narration is imminent. The fight now seems to be whether this transformation happens only in production, or companies like Apple succeed in breaking the total Audiobook price apart into "license" and "production", only buying the license and have the production done on their proprietary servers. Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a sharp decline in professionally narrated Audiobooks...
  - amelius 4y ago
    > Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a sharp decline in professionally narrated Audiobooks... Or, it will increase demand for audiobooks so much that more humans are needed to create top-notch audio.
    - rickdeckard 4y ago
      I don't know how badly narrated Audiobooks can increase the demand for Audiobooks as a whole. The only scenario I could imagine is a narration language where Audiobooks didn't exist so far for economic reasons (i.e. low population). Digital narration could bring down production costs to the point of making it economic, basically creating the audiobook market for this language. But then, if the narration is bad (which it likely is because TTS is worse in minor languages), I don't know how many users could be converted to pay a premium for a better human narration. Also here I think it's more likely that funding will be used to improve the narration engine as a whole instead of going back to hiring humans and renting a studio for each book...
  - rdevsrex 4y ago
    One of the things I like is when the narrator has to suppress a laugh during a funny passage, or can express a character's anger or frustration. Until AI is so good that it can mimic emotion, I think there will be a market for human narrators. Of course it will be smaller than what it is now, but I think people will specialize.
nstart 4y ago
I'm not sure how I feel about the quality of this. It... drones. The samples are really bad. It's not that the voices sound robotic. The reading is boring. If this was tested on me without prior knowledge, I'd say "not sure if human or not. But it's a bad reading either way". Edit: Adding a few more details to my thoughts to say why it's boring. Good narration is so much more than correct pauses. Pacing. Emotion around words like death and life. Ensuring that sentences don't repeatedly end on the same inflection tone. Modulation of rhythm. None of that is there. The last time I ran into this was when a known person started a youtube channel where they put together the script and the video and then used an AI to narrate the script. I assumed it was an AI because I figured that's how said acquaintance would have managed the budget. But it was incredibly tedious to listen to. You can see this in work here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWVvmKpCBDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWVvmKpCBDg). Has the same feel of the Apple digital narration. I don't know how I could listen to that easily for over an hour.
- aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
  I have listened to a fair amount of fan fiction read aloud with what seems to be the default Siri voice in the fanfiction.net app. Like watching something with subtitles, you don't hear the drone after a while. It does put a lot more emphasis on the quality of the writing, which can be rough with fanfic.
TacWitch 4y ago
Mitchell sounds exactly like Ray Porter. I wonder if he trained a model with them or they did it without his direct approval
- jjcm 4y ago
  I reached out to him on Twitter [0] asking exactly this. According to a Reddit comment [1] it is, but they haven’t posted their source. [0] https://twitter.com/pwnies/status/1610857711008370688?s=46&t=9tJYw3BZ9fDIoueT6p6jeA https://twitter.com/pwnies/status/1610857711008370688?s=46&t... [1] https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/103iogu/_/j305eby/?context=1 https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/103iogu/_/j305eby/?conte...
  - CubsFan1060 4y ago
    I don’t think you got the correct Ray Porter. Correct one is https://twitter.com/Ray__Porter https://twitter.com/Ray__Porter
    - jjcm 4y ago
      Doh. Thank you - didn't realize it was the double underscore.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > Mitchell sounds exactly like Ray Porter. "Mitchell sounds like Ray Porter" is more accurate. Accent is completely different, so they don't sound exactly alike. My first impression was that Mitchell sounds like a Clay Jenkinson,[1] but more a cross between Jenkinson and a male newscaster I can't place who is probably retired now, but who also narrated documentaries. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8UoL0AOL3k&t=1m49s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8UoL0AOL3k&t=1m49s
- tartuffe78 4y ago
  Yea I immediately recognized him, hope he's getting paid for this.
dmazin 4y ago
Woah, the Madison voice is quite clearly Julia Whelan.
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  Lucasfilms licensed James Earl Jones iconic voice in perpetuity when he retired from acting (come on there is only ONE Darth Vader voice) - no doubt he and his estate in the future will get nice annual royalty cheques from Mr Mouse. I wonder how this works with her ???.
- thiht 4y ago
  Mitchell sounds like Alan Rickman, I felt like I was hearing Snape reading the sentence. I like it
  - jasonjmcghee 4y ago
    I heard and rather confident it's Ray Porter- it's uncanny. Instantly recognized it (have listened to a number of books narrated by him)
- habosa 4y ago
  100%, I noticed it immediately.
dwighttk 4y ago
Can I plug a standard ebook in and get digital narration? Or just Apple Books?
- strictnein 4y ago
  Neither. The author of the book has to utilize these.
kumarvvr 4y ago
Is it just a coincidence that only a few days back I saw an article or video about how low a payment audible makes to its authors? It was a famous author too. And now this announcement.
- Ruthalas 4y ago
  Likely referring to Brandon Sanderson's recent comments[0]. Edit: Previous discussion on HN: [1] [0] https://winteriscoming.net/2022/12/30/brandon-sanderson-blasts-audible-unconscionable-indie-author-pay-rates/ https://winteriscoming.net/2022/12/30/brandon-sanderson-blas... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34104204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34104204
drexlspivey 4y ago
I’m very interested to see if/how the model can figure out to produce a different voice when a character is speaking and how to keep the same voice for each character across the whole book consistent. Especially the second problem is not trivial at all from my understanding of how neural networks work.
jdmoreira 4y ago
2019 I did an "Ask HN: When will text-to-speech replace narrators" Most answers did not age well I would say. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20931541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20931541
- phphphphp 4y ago
  The answers seem to have aged quite well! Apple specifically say that this is designed as a complement to human narration and not a replacement: some aspect of that is Apple protecting relationships with the audiobook industry, but it’s also fair to say that the humanness of human narration is still unmatched by text-to-speech. For many people, high quality text-to-speech will be good enough to enjoy but it doesn’t seem likely to be an audiobook replacement today. That said, I suspect it’s less of a technology issue and more cultural: the current generation growing up on robot audio will have different expectations to previous generations, the lack of humanness probably isn’t an issue for them, so even if the technology can never exactly replicate the humanness of audiobooks, it may not matter. (The text-to-speech on TikTok, for example, is often lampooned by people not of the TikTok generation for being disconcerting and annoying, whereas young people seem to have no problem with it… and that voice is much more artificial sounding than these Apple examples).
  - phphphphp 4y ago
    Also as far as predictions go, I predict that a few years from now there’ll be research and think pieces about the impact learning from artificial voices has on young children.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  If this is your standard, the answer was 2020 or maybe earlier. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271329 I don't think publishers will stop hiring professional narrators for the bestsellers (instead of the long tail that has been text-only until recently) for a few years more.
mongol 4y ago
What accent is used by the first voice? It creeps me slightly, some kind of rz sounds...
mgh2 4y ago
Samples from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253424 Male: https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/pale-moon-rising/id1640767269 https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/pale-moon-rising/id1640... Female: https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/shelter-from-the-storm/id1640812516 https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/shelter-from-the-storm/...
- jasonjmcghee 4y ago
  The male sample has many pauses that are distractingly long. Pretty interesting.
londons_explore 4y ago
I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users. As a user focussed feature, it could read any audiobook out loud, and would differentiate apple books from any other audiobook platform. I guess it's aimed at authors, because then they can charge the author for the 'narration' service....
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users. Licensing. Audiobooks are a different license from ebooks, and trying to narrate an audiobook will infringe the licensing terms.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Apple is big enough they could just tell authors "here is our new narration feature for users. If you don't like it, pull your books off our platform.". No author is going to win a twitter flame war because they don't want a 'speak it out loud' button provided by apple on their ebooks. Besides - all ebooks on Apple platforms already support this via: Settings → General → Accessibility → VoiceOver → ON turns on the VoiceOver feature This is just a higher quality version of the same.
    - hnbad 4y ago
      Your view is a bit myopic as you seem to assume Apple can just throw its weight at it and that winning in the US market would be the same as winning globally. Books are one of the oldest media around and as a consequence most jurisdictions have fairly extensive and specific laws around them and their authors' and publishers' rights. In many cases copyright itself is ultimately based on laws created to deal with authors and publishers. Infamously, Amazon tried to snub book pricing laws and lost. Google got into hot water with newspaper publishers because its news app violated laws originally written for citing physical newspapers. This is like suggesting Spotify just ignore the RIAA or Netflix should just stream all content in all countries, licensing restrictions be damned.
    - 4y ago
andy_ppp 4y ago
"Once your request is submitted, it takes one to two months to process the book and conduct quality checks." My guess is that these generated voices are far from perfect and someone has to go in and crank the algorithm to get a fair number of passages to not sound strange. Even in the example Helena there is a word at the end of a sentence that sounds like it should be in the middle and has a bit of weirdness to it. Still, very impressive, I think better than I remember Amazon Poly sounding.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  Why is that we still can't have a perfect or near-perfect text-to-speech given all the astonishing advances in ML taking place? Is TTS an area nobody is really interested in or is it harder than generating beautiful pictures and sophisticated writings? This thing by Apple already sounds way better than the best I heard previously (NextUp Ivona) but it is not an instant-result offline tool yet and that's sad.
  - JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    My uneducated opinion on the matter is that we are more tolerant of subtle errors in pictures and writings than we are in sounds. Subtle variations of tone can change the meaning of a conversation that words on paper just can't convey.
    - qwerty456127 4y ago
      As a person who has listened to a number of non-fiction books narrated by Microsoft Sam I don't really mind "subtle variations of tone" :-) This Apple thing will already satisfy me if they release it as an offline app for converting plain text files into audio files.
  - justincormack 4y ago
    The pictures have weird limbs and the writing has errors. A book is long therefore there will be a lot of issues.
  - 4y ago
33955985 4y ago
So happy to hear Apple putting African American voices front and center for this initiative. Along with Google’s push to make camera lenses / computational photography more accurate for darker skin (and Apple following suit) this feels like a real step forward for inclusion.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  Voices have a race?
  - vortegne 4y ago
    Often there are clear voice and accent differences. Are you saying there aren't? That would be a very strange statement.
    - mhuffman 4y ago
      Not so strange! ... at least when it comes to the legal community[1] (pdf). For those around during the O.J. Simpson trial, this was a very, very contentious topic during the trial! [1]https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl.edu/dist/3/2151/files/2019/09/amspeechbaugh.pdf https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl.edu/dist/3/2151/fi...
      - vortegne 4y ago
        I see your point. And of course it's not a 100% accurate thing, but you know what I mean. Being admissible in court as evidence and furthering representation of a group are two completely different things.
    - drexlspivey 4y ago
      Accent depends on where you were born/raised, not on your race.
      - 33955985 4y ago
mensetmanusman 4y ago
It would be great if these voices were Siri options. The new Siri choices are quite bad…
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Can it pronounce ”Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buff...
flakiness 4y ago
I hope Amazon does this too but probably they won't because it'll cannibalize Audible. This is good move from Apple. Take the credit!
mark_l_watson 4y ago
While TTS has broad application, I am skeptical about Apple’s process being able to compete with the best narrators. I have my biases. My wife and I have licenses to listen to about 500 Audible audio books and in the best of them I feel like I have a human to human relationship with the narrator that is similar to a relationship with the author. I have mostly worked on deep learning projects over the last eight years, so I appreciate the tech as an engineering tool, but I think it is important to view tech as a servant to human experience.
- macintux 4y ago
  Best narrators? Agreed. But as someone who did some recording for a local radio station years ago, it’s an incredibly time-intensive project to record a book.
- RegnisGnaw 4y ago
  Not every book can afford the best narrators. A good one charges somewhere in the ballpark of $300-500 a finished hour. So for an average novel that's like $3000-5000. Not all writers can afford that, so this is an cheaper alternative. Its like an Lexus vs Hyundai.
ghaff 4y ago
I'm skeptical given the state of the art. There is way more good audio content out there than I have the time/interest to listen too and I can't believe I'm that atypical. And a book is a relatively big listening time commitment. I'll happily pay a few dollars more for a good human narrator.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  Indeed. But this option will only be available if a critical mass is also willing to pay a few dollars more for human narration. In times of flat-fee Audiobook platforms the pressure to bring down audiobook production costs will only increase, funding a full-fledged Audiobook production for each book will only become harder to justify. Moreover, looking at what Apple describes here, they seemingly want to establish digital narration (quality) as a metric for competition between Audiobook marketplaces, not publishers. So if this works out, the major platforms will compete on digital narration and publishers will have less incentive to actually produce an Audiobook with human narrators...
  - ghaff 4y ago
    That's fair and it's true of a lot of AI/ML versions of content. I still paid for human transcriptions of podcasts when I was doing them because the time needed to clean up the ML versions just wasn't a good return. But the day will certainly come when that calculus changes. I know nothing about the economics of audiobooks. And will note that there are free public domain audio books already https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/. But TTS will improve and, at a minimum, improved TTS will be a benefit for people who can't read for various reasons.
    - rickdeckard 4y ago
      Well, an intent of Apple seems to be to break the price of an Audiobook into license and production cost, take control of the production using AI and pay only the publishing license, instead of having to buy the rights to sell an Audiobook as a separate work of Art (because in the end, their engine will create the work of Art from the written word). Sadly I don't see how this will make Audiobooks any better than human narration could. It's more about streaming platforms taking more control over the content and have experienced people train their proprietary TTS engine along the way. Just to avoid confusion on Librivox: They offer Audiobooks of works which are already in the public domain (so not only the Audiobook is in public domain, also the rights for the book have already expired). So it's a platform allowing people to make free narration of already-free content.
Hakeemmidan 4y ago
I regularly use my MacBook for narration. I look forward to this being better-adapted for books.
ivansavz 4y ago
Or you could use the command `say` on the command line on any current mac to get good-enough text-to-speech. See full script here: https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/de3ccb244224d101bb93320fee1cab39#file-txt2mp3-sh-L22-L23 https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/de3ccb244224d101bb93320... and this doc explains how you can setup a keyboard shortcut to turn any text selection into an audio book https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem8qpMmnaBFYOgV32gdMc/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem... Here is a sample if you want to hear what it sounds like: https://minireference.com/static/tmp/constructive_feedback.mp3 https://minireference.com/static/tmp/constructive_feedback.m... which is the audio from this blog post https://productivityhub.org/2019/04/19/how-to-deliver-constructive-feedback-in-difficult-situations/ https://productivityhub.org/2019/04/19/how-to-deliver-constr... IMHO, the computer generated voice like Alex (the default voice on mac OS) sounds better because it doesn't try to do inflections or add human character when it is reading. The real-world narrators (voice actors) seem to add too much "character" into their reading, which me distracts from the story/content. The only exception is when the narration is done by the author, in which case I'd consider the narration as part of the work.
- hiidrew 4y ago
  TIL. This is an interesting capability of the command line. Have any more fun ones? (at least fun to a CL noob)
  - ivansavz 4y ago
    Here is another script `getmp3.sh` that you can use to download .mp3 file from any youtube music video: #!/usr/bin/env bash echo "Downloading mp3 from $1" yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 "$1" You'll need to install https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#installation https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#installation before you can use that. As you can see, the "script" is just so to add a options `-x` (extract audio) and `--audio-format mp3` to convert to mp3 in the end.
  - macintux 4y ago
    I haven't figured out how to effectively search my HN favorites, else I'd probably be able to find a few more of these, but this was discussed recently: https://git.herrbischoff.com/awesome-macos-command-line/about/ https://git.herrbischoff.com/awesome-macos-command-line/abou...
dpratt 4y ago
“Mitchell” is clearly Ray Porter, an absolutely phenomenal voice actor/narrator. He’s done a range of audiobooks across many genres, and anything he does is a pleasure to listen to. I sure hope that he negotiated a gigantic amount for his data/training set provided to Apple, as this tech sounds like it’s getting advanced enough to obviate a giant chunk of the narration business overnight.
- southp4w 4y ago
  Just replied this to someone else. Instantly recognizable as Ray! Phenomenal narrator. He and Nick Podehl are my favorites
jensensbutton 4y ago
Tech doesn't seem that great? Google demo'd Duplex in 2018 and it was so good at voice synthesis that people were arguing about whether or not it's ethical to not disclaim you're talking to AI.
alanwreath 4y ago
I guess I kind of wish they would just offer the AI narration as a feature of Apple ebooks. Such that, if you buy the book, you can have ebooks read to you by your phone. I am really just buying books off audible with the subscription they offer. There are some books (tech books that is) that are offered as audio books and I gobble those up. There are, however, many more epub/digital books that I never buy not because I'm uninterested in the content but only because I don't have the time to sit down. I assume that for said books the audience isn't large enough (and may never be) to merit anyone ever recording the audiobook. There are certain books that I think I'll always buy the non-AI variant because narrators can bring more than natural reading, they sometimes bring different characters (sometimes more feminine, more baritone, more stereotypical accents) -- and I would melt if AI could do that kind of voice acting.
- cjensen 4y ago
  Amazon at one time tried to add voice reading to Kindle books. Authors were absolutely livid. Audiobooks are a significant income source, and taking that away from authors is going to make authors decline to sell digital books on your platform. Apple is doing this right by making it an author's choice.
  - alanwreath 4y ago
    I totally see this point — I’m making a separate one for ebooks that aren’t getting purchased because they haven’t been (and probably never will be) narrated by a real human.
    - cjensen 4y ago
      I agree with you. Apple making this an author choice avoids some authors being angry while enabling more sales for lower-volume books that as you point out, will otherwise not have an spoken version.
- layer8 4y ago
  This should be a feature available for any text document. The existing iOS text-to-speech is almost barely adequate, but not really.
habosa 4y ago
Whoah the Madison voice sounds _exactly_ like Julia Whelan, who is a real audiobook narrator. I have listened to many articles on Audm (narrated news articles) using her voice. I wonder if she had a part in this?
- urbandw311er 4y ago
  If she did she’ll likely be NDA’d up to her neck to prevent her ever admitting it publicly.
- southp4w 4y ago
  The Mitchell voice also sounds almost exactly like Ray Porter, another real audiobook narrator.
  - fuzzywalrus 4y ago
    I heard that and it was uncanny how much it sounded like ray porter to me
rahoulb 4y ago
I have to say that a number of audiobooks I've bought recently have been totally spoilt by the narration - and the AI voices on offer here all sound better than the humans involved in those books. I also remember reading, a couple of years ago, that Apple was working on improving the voices for Siri - resulting in me thinking "surely Apple has more important things to work on to improve Siri". I guess this was what they were actually aiming for.
- mcphage 4y ago
  > I guess this was what they were actually aiming for. I would imagine it was the other direction—that this is a way for them to test out their improvements to Siri.
- Dig1t 4y ago
  It's so true! It's such a tragedy when a really good book is ruined by bad narration. All of the Hitchhikers Guide books (except for the first one, which is masterfully read by Stephen Fry), are a good example, but there are tons of other examples. There's usually only one version as well so you can't even shop around for a version with a better narrator either.
  - rahoulb 4y ago
    If you can find it, look for the BBC Radio version of Hitchhikers, from the late 70s, early 80s. Each version has a slightly different variation on the story and the radio one is my favourite of the lot. My friend had a copy of the scripts from the radio series and we used to use it as inspiration - "open the scripts at a random page and our band name will be the first thing that Marvin says ... Zootlewurdle - perfect!" I've got them on a set of CDs somewhere, but have nothing that will play them...
  - dirtyid 4y ago
    I've learned to enjoy particularly robotic TTS narrations because after a while it becomes associated with my internal voice, and it feels like I'm "reading" the book versus elaborately produced audiobooks that are experiencially closer to enjoying a show. And feel less hesitation about listening at 3x speed. With practice, I can start layering on personality to different characters with neutral TTS voices.
WalterBright 4y ago
The first versions of Amazon's Kindle did this. Then they got mired in lawsuits over it from the book industry.
- hintymad 4y ago
  I had the same question, but Apple seems offer the narration to authors so they can choose whether a book comes with text to speech.
- gdcbe 4y ago
  Why the law suits. I would say: offer it with a big warning that this is automated and might be bad quality. Those books that have narrated versions can come with a buy extra button to have a professionally narrated version. For which I’m probably more then happy to pay. As an avid reader with 3 kids it’s nice to be able to switch between audio and text book, depending on my availability and context. As such of no professionaly narrated version is available am automated one is way better then nothing. Also, having the progress sync between digital text book and audio version is a great UX improvement!
  - rockemsockem 4y ago
    The lawsuits were because Amazon just did it, without any author/publisher buy in. They just said "you can convert this ebook using our TTS with the kindle" and the publishers did *not* like that. IMO that is how this should work, any text anywhere should be convertible to auido.
    - gdcbe 4y ago
      It’s anyway just making it more difficult right, as ebooks can be converted anyway using an external program, many which have way to use gui’s. But i guess it’sas far as they can make use of liability laws
  - potatolicious 4y ago
    > Why the law suits. Because the contracts between Amazon and the publishers do not permit this kind of work. Like, this is (legally) a pretty open and shut issue. Amazon has a license from the publisher for the book that permits a certain range of activities that are contemplated by the contract: showing short excerpts for marketing for example. IP licenses are carefully constructed, often because the rights are sold to different parties. You may for example license a book to adapt into a movie, but the contract would likely forbid you from adapting it for a TV show. The publisher may sell those two rights separately to two different parties. And these contracts likely either specifically forbid constructing an audiobook (automated or otherwise) from the original book, or at least do not contemplate it. That is a clear source of lawsuits where Amazon is likely clearly in the wrong. Another reply here mentions that the publishes do not "like" that Amazon went ahead and did this without consultation. That may very well be true - but more importantly (and constructively) it's likely that Amazon's behavior is specifically forbidden in the contract they voluntarily signed on to with the publisher.
SurgeArrest 4y ago
Would love to see one day AI used to read annotated text with multiple voices, so each person in a novel gets his/her voice and also narrative voice. Would be epic and actually better than most audio books read by a single person attempting to pretend to speak in different voices. Was always frustrated that Kindle was barred from reading books, it is such a natural progression of capabilities. Leave up to the buyer to decide if they want to pay for the person, but default TTS should be allowed for all books, such that if I read book at home and then can continue listening during a walk.
banana_giraffe 4y ago
The biggest failing for me: They don't appear to be making any attempt to have the narration use inflections for different characters. This is probably fine for nonfiction books, but for fiction books, it can make it really hard to follow when a narrator does this, at least for me.
- visitect 4y ago
  I understand this sentiment. I've been an audible subscriber since 2002 and have listened to hundreds of audiobooks, mostly fiction. The ability of the narrator to provide distinct, interesting voices for each character figures prominently into my enjoyment of a book. This technology sounds fantastic, and will likely enable pleasant narration of texts that would otherwise never have it, but I don't think it's likely to replace professional narrators for a large number of cases.
kmeisthax 4y ago
So at first I thought Apple had managed to undo the whole nonsense that book publishers strong-armed Amazon into doing where they can turn off TTS narration to make you buy the audiobook. But instead this seems to just be "hey if you want to use TTS instead of a paid narrator, you can". Already kinda shitty, but there's extra shit cherries on top: the resulting recording cannot be used on other book platforms. Only Apple Books and the DRM nonsense that killed public libraries. So it's also platform capitalist moat building, too - i.e. a scheme to deprive Amazon Audible of audiobooks. The more publishers opt to use Apple Books digital narration instead of paying a narrator, the less audiobooks will be available on Audible. And yes, you are allowed to still pay a narrator and distribute that recording on Audible, but... if you could do that, then obviously you wouldn't bother with Apple's TTS system. Of course, the flipside of this is that Amazon refuses to bother with copyright enforcement for books not on Audible. Cory Doctorow found this out the hard way[0]. If you do not license your work to Amazon, Amazon will pay someone else to copy it, and for some reason DMCA 512 protects them[1]. So I can see this winding up being a functionally unused service anyway. [0] https://www.audible.com/pd/Why-None-of-My-Books-Are-Available-on-Audible-Audiobook/B0B7KH8KSD?ref=a_author_Co_c19_lProduct_1_2&pf_rd_p=1ae0e65e-ad09-4aa7-aa73-772cefb1b5e1&pf_rd_r=N0PM6K7YC23JT308RPX7&pageLoadId=BxxuIctIJpGyXpHa&creativeId=73c32a9a-e504-4597-bb87-c30c58fc0204 https://www.audible.com/pd/Why-None-of-My-Books-Are-Availabl... [1] To be clear, I do not oppose DMCA 512; I just don't think DRM-bearing audiobook services that charge money should be allowed to disclaim copyright liability. DMCA 512 and 1201 should be mutually exclusive.
freyr 4y ago
It’s odd they label the voices as “soprano” and “baritone,” because they don’t sound like it. I suspect it’s to avoid labeling the speakers as “male” and “female.” What a joke.
thedailymail 4y ago
I'm curious about the thinking behind "mysteries and thrillers, and science fiction and fantasy are not currently supported." Is it because these genres use more non-standard words? Or is there more risk of the Apple voice being used to narrate sonething inappropriate?
barelysapient 4y ago
It’s the spaces between sentences and between pauses that need work. Usually a reader will take a breath or finish exhaling. Instead Apple’s audio drops to 0 db. It sounds unnatural. Mechanical.

300 points by alienreborn 4y ago

The OG Kindle with keyboard used to have text to speech too. It was killed by publishers who wanted to charge separately for audiobooks. If Apple has somehow managed to get the licensing for this, I might consider buying from Apple Books in the future.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago
licensing as in?
- theshrike79 4y ago
  License/copyright for written form of book is different than the read form. Author might sell the book rights to company X and audiobook rights to company Y. Company X can't do a text to speech version of their book without infringing on Y. Y cant do speech to text of their version without angering X. Licenses are fun!
rickdeckard 4y ago
The product is actually directed at authors, offering them to have an Audiobook produced which is "digitally narrated by Apple Books". The Author still needs to hold the rights for Audiobook production, and he needs to license a third party to produce an Audiobook (no matter if human or "digitally" narrated). I guess that's why this is aimed at "independent Authors", to circumvent negotiating Apple's rev.share and exclusivity for that production with established publishers...
carlob 4y ago
You are never buying from Apple Books, it's the usual DRMed crap, more like a rental. Amazon had gotten a lot of flak, buy Apple is not any better in this respect...
- criddell 4y ago
  Most Apple and Amazon Books are DRM encumbered, but not all. AFAIK, there isn’t a way to tell before you buy the book except by choosing books from publishers that don’t use DRM on any of their titles.
- ezfe 4y ago
  If DRM works offline, it's not a rental. It's not desirable, but don't call it a rental, that just moves focus away from what the real problems are here.
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    Even if it works offline, it probably won't continue to work if you need to switch to a new device after their DRM servers are turned off. DRMed content can never truly be purchased.
shrx 4y ago
> It was killed by publishers who wanted to charge separately for audiobooks. Any sources on this?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bentley 4y ago
  Amazon decides Kindle speech isn’t worth copyright fight (2009) — https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/03/amazon-backs-off-on-kindles-text-to-speech/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/03/amazon-backs-off-on-... See also the recent lawsuit covering the other direction, automatic transcription of Audible books. https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-owned-audible-major-publishers-settle-lawsuit-audiobook-translation-feature/ https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-owned-audible-major-pub...
  - shrx 4y ago
    Thanks. I never really used Kindle Speech on my 3G Kindle, but was curious why it was suddenly gone in later versions.

walterbell 4y ago

Good to see mainstream accessibility work on high-quality text to speech. On iOS/macOS, VoiceDream has offered flexible apps with voices in multiple languages and accents since 2012, e.g. for reading PDFs, web, non-DRM ePub books and scanned text, https://www.voicedream.com/about/ https://www.voicedream.com/about/.

lvl102 4y ago

I am surprised it’s taking so long for big tech companies to roll this out. I suppose there’s too much money in audiobooks? Perhaps licensing issues? If anyone can get a “celebrity reads aloud” feature that would be Apple and that could be big.

hxugufjfjf 4y ago
I cannot put into words how much I want Silmarillion read by Scarlett Johansson.
rickdeckard 4y ago
Yes, licensing. Narrated books are a separate publishing license, with its own production-cost model. So a tech.company like Apple already having rights to sell the written words is still not licensed to publish a narrated version. To sell an Audiobook, they have to acquire the license for a separate product, which so far includes the produced Audiobook itself. It seems Apple is trying to get the audiobook license directly from those authors who didn't sign the license away yet, undercutting production cost for the Audiobook with "digital narration" and then earning more money per sale... I guess we're going to see human narration die very fast now, at least for some common languages, and tech.companies want to ensure that they can split license from production cost, instead of being forced to buy the "whole" Audiobook...
- karmasimida 4y ago
  TBH it will depend on how those narrations turn out to be. Cherr-picking is easy, but I paid for this, it needs to be human quality throughout
  - rickdeckard 4y ago
    True, but I expect the critical mass of the target group will remain to be people frequently listening to Audiobooks --> Those people are more-likely subscribed to an Audiobook service --> are not paying a per-audiobook price but a flat-fee --> The flat-fee for the whole catalog is lower than buying one audiobook. I would expect this target-group to access a mix of human and digitally narrated books during the transition to digital narration, with best-selling books still being narrated by humans. Users may then complain about the quality of the digital narration, but will keep using such services as the price-expectation is now set. --> A competition for better digital narration engines will likely drive evolution of the engine and authoring tools, further increasing the pressure of publishers to justify the bottom-line of per-book Audiobook production costs. > Cherry-picking is easy, but I paid for this, it needs to be human quality throughout That's a really interesting aspect. If the Audiobook delivers the content with a human voice but still not engaging enough, how many listeners would put the blame on the narration rather than the book itself... ("I like this new song of Metallica, but I don't like how they sing it")

bongobingo1 4y ago

Will we see this level of voice synthesis in the public domain? Maybe I am out of touch but I found those examples very impressive - more impressive than the jobs vs rogan demo a few months back. But I am also saddened at a future where all this is locked up in corporate hands - obviously there is money needed and (licensed) data needed too which Apple can get at. Honestly I would rather eschew the ethics of it and just consume any and all voice data (youtube, podcasts, existing audiobooks, radio) that has transcripts available, perhaps because I assume corpos are already doing this, if it means we can have a free and open data model that people can run at home, maybe that makes me evil.

rickdeckard 4y ago
My guess is that such "digital narration" is on the brink of becoming available as a service to authors and publishers, with Amazon and Apple trying to get ahead of it by selling a product that can only be published on their platforms then. They are surely able to undercut human narration, but even on digital narration they have an unfair advantage of earning a share on every sale as well. Will be interesting to see how this develops. Either independent digital narration becomes competitive enough that a publisher simply gets it done once and then sells it on all platforms, or this new platform-exclusive model is so disruptive that it becomes even less economic to produce a Audiobook, effectively making Audiobooks exclusive to Apple and Amazon/Audible (and whoever else has such a digital narration engine).
- patentatt 4y ago
  I'm curious what the economics are here, because getting someone to just read a book can't possibly be that expensive, right? I'm not talking celebrity voice-over work, but just getting anybody with a passable voice to sit down a spend a day or so reading a book into a microphone? Does that really cost that much more than having someone sit down a listen to the whole AI-generated audio book to do QA? And then there's all of the engineers who have to work on the project, the hardware to run all of it, etc. Seems like if it takes months to do and has to be QA'd anyways, it can't be that much more cost effective. Now, if it's completely computer-generated and can be a push-button feature? Sure, that makes sense. I wonder how close they are to that.

csande17 4y ago

The "Helena" sample contains a pretty good test case of this system's ability to guess where emphasis and pauses go: > I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild. (I checked in an online sample of the ebook: there is no punctuation in this sentence.) Unfortunately the AI completely faceplants, placing an enormous pause right in the middle of the phrase "all places wild". It actually changes the meaning of the text, making it sound more like "...the beauty he saw in all places. Wild!" I wonder if any of these AI speech synthesis tools come with an editing tool that you could use to tell it not to put the pause there.

m_eiman 4y ago
I'm guessing that the main reason they require you to go through their "preferred partners" is that their job is to insert annontations that the speech generator needs to make it sound good. I wonder if this is because it's difficult work, or if the tools aren't user friendly enough to put in the hands of untrained users. If it's the latter I suppose that sooner or later we won't need to go through the partners.
- csande17 4y ago
  The sample is taken from a full audiobook that is currently available for sale, so you'd think they would've put an annotation on "all places wild" if they had that ability.
cprecioso 4y ago
I guess this is more of a case of garbage in - garbage out. The original sentence itself is not well-structured. But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. I don't feel like this is a product for carefully producing audiobooks, but to create them by the pound, so to speak. I'd say it's a move for the "make your own business through audiobooks" people [1] -- very strange for Apple. [1]: I didn't know this audience existed until I saw this video on it (and the cons that happen) from Dan Olson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

"Digitally narrated titles are a valuable complement to professionally narrated audiobooks" Yeah, right. What a lame attempt to deflect the (fully warranted) criticism that this will put audiobook narrators out of work.

rickdeckard 4y ago
I think the cat is already out of the bag, and the death of human narration is imminent. The fight now seems to be whether this transformation happens only in production, or companies like Apple succeed in breaking the total Audiobook price apart into "license" and "production", only buying the license and have the production done on their proprietary servers. Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a sharp decline in professionally narrated Audiobooks...
- amelius 4y ago
  > Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a sharp decline in professionally narrated Audiobooks... Or, it will increase demand for audiobooks so much that more humans are needed to create top-notch audio.
  - rickdeckard 4y ago
    I don't know how badly narrated Audiobooks can increase the demand for Audiobooks as a whole. The only scenario I could imagine is a narration language where Audiobooks didn't exist so far for economic reasons (i.e. low population). Digital narration could bring down production costs to the point of making it economic, basically creating the audiobook market for this language. But then, if the narration is bad (which it likely is because TTS is worse in minor languages), I don't know how many users could be converted to pay a premium for a better human narration. Also here I think it's more likely that funding will be used to improve the narration engine as a whole instead of going back to hiring humans and renting a studio for each book...
- rdevsrex 4y ago
  One of the things I like is when the narrator has to suppress a laugh during a funny passage, or can express a character's anger or frustration. Until AI is so good that it can mimic emotion, I think there will be a market for human narrators. Of course it will be smaller than what it is now, but I think people will specialize.

nstart 4y ago

I'm not sure how I feel about the quality of this. It... drones. The samples are really bad. It's not that the voices sound robotic. The reading is boring. If this was tested on me without prior knowledge, I'd say "not sure if human or not. But it's a bad reading either way". Edit: Adding a few more details to my thoughts to say why it's boring. Good narration is so much more than correct pauses. Pacing. Emotion around words like death and life. Ensuring that sentences don't repeatedly end on the same inflection tone. Modulation of rhythm. None of that is there. The last time I ran into this was when a known person started a youtube channel where they put together the script and the video and then used an AI to narrate the script. I assumed it was an AI because I figured that's how said acquaintance would have managed the budget. But it was incredibly tedious to listen to. You can see this in work here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWVvmKpCBDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWVvmKpCBDg). Has the same feel of the Apple digital narration. I don't know how I could listen to that easily for over an hour.

aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
I have listened to a fair amount of fan fiction read aloud with what seems to be the default Siri voice in the fanfiction.net app. Like watching something with subtitles, you don't hear the drone after a while. It does put a lot more emphasis on the quality of the writing, which can be rough with fanfic.

TacWitch 4y ago

Mitchell sounds exactly like Ray Porter. I wonder if he trained a model with them or they did it without his direct approval

jjcm 4y ago
I reached out to him on Twitter [0] asking exactly this. According to a Reddit comment [1] it is, but they haven’t posted their source. [0] https://twitter.com/pwnies/status/1610857711008370688?s=46&t=9tJYw3BZ9fDIoueT6p6jeA https://twitter.com/pwnies/status/1610857711008370688?s=46&t... [1] https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/103iogu/_/j305eby/?context=1 https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/103iogu/_/j305eby/?conte...
- CubsFan1060 4y ago
  I don’t think you got the correct Ray Porter. Correct one is https://twitter.com/Ray__Porter https://twitter.com/Ray__Porter
  - jjcm 4y ago
    Doh. Thank you - didn't realize it was the double underscore.
Maursault 4y ago
> Mitchell sounds exactly like Ray Porter. "Mitchell sounds like Ray Porter" is more accurate. Accent is completely different, so they don't sound exactly alike. My first impression was that Mitchell sounds like a Clay Jenkinson,[1] but more a cross between Jenkinson and a male newscaster I can't place who is probably retired now, but who also narrated documentaries. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8UoL0AOL3k&t=1m49s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8UoL0AOL3k&t=1m49s
tartuffe78 4y ago
Yea I immediately recognized him, hope he's getting paid for this.

dmazin 4y ago

Woah, the Madison voice is quite clearly Julia Whelan.

tibbydudeza 4y ago
Lucasfilms licensed James Earl Jones iconic voice in perpetuity when he retired from acting (come on there is only ONE Darth Vader voice) - no doubt he and his estate in the future will get nice annual royalty cheques from Mr Mouse. I wonder how this works with her ???.
thiht 4y ago
Mitchell sounds like Alan Rickman, I felt like I was hearing Snape reading the sentence. I like it
- jasonjmcghee 4y ago
  I heard and rather confident it's Ray Porter- it's uncanny. Instantly recognized it (have listened to a number of books narrated by him)
habosa 4y ago
100%, I noticed it immediately.

dwighttk 4y ago

Can I plug a standard ebook in and get digital narration? Or just Apple Books?

strictnein 4y ago
Neither. The author of the book has to utilize these.

kumarvvr 4y ago

Is it just a coincidence that only a few days back I saw an article or video about how low a payment audible makes to its authors? It was a famous author too. And now this announcement.

Ruthalas 4y ago
Likely referring to Brandon Sanderson's recent comments[0]. Edit: Previous discussion on HN: [1] [0] https://winteriscoming.net/2022/12/30/brandon-sanderson-blasts-audible-unconscionable-indie-author-pay-rates/ https://winteriscoming.net/2022/12/30/brandon-sanderson-blas... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34104204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34104204

drexlspivey 4y ago

I’m very interested to see if/how the model can figure out to produce a different voice when a character is speaking and how to keep the same voice for each character across the whole book consistent. Especially the second problem is not trivial at all from my understanding of how neural networks work.

jdmoreira 4y ago

2019 I did an "Ask HN: When will text-to-speech replace narrators" Most answers did not age well I would say. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20931541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20931541

phphphphp 4y ago
The answers seem to have aged quite well! Apple specifically say that this is designed as a complement to human narration and not a replacement: some aspect of that is Apple protecting relationships with the audiobook industry, but it’s also fair to say that the humanness of human narration is still unmatched by text-to-speech. For many people, high quality text-to-speech will be good enough to enjoy but it doesn’t seem likely to be an audiobook replacement today. That said, I suspect it’s less of a technology issue and more cultural: the current generation growing up on robot audio will have different expectations to previous generations, the lack of humanness probably isn’t an issue for them, so even if the technology can never exactly replicate the humanness of audiobooks, it may not matter. (The text-to-speech on TikTok, for example, is often lampooned by people not of the TikTok generation for being disconcerting and annoying, whereas young people seem to have no problem with it… and that voice is much more artificial sounding than these Apple examples).
- phphphphp 4y ago
  Also as far as predictions go, I predict that a few years from now there’ll be research and think pieces about the impact learning from artificial voices has on young children.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
If this is your standard, the answer was 2020 or maybe earlier. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271329 I don't think publishers will stop hiring professional narrators for the bestsellers (instead of the long tail that has been text-only until recently) for a few years more.

mongol 4y ago

What accent is used by the first voice? It creeps me slightly, some kind of rz sounds...

mgh2 4y ago

Samples from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253424 Male: https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/pale-moon-rising/id1640767269 https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/pale-moon-rising/id1640... Female: https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/shelter-from-the-storm/id1640812516 https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/shelter-from-the-storm/...

jasonjmcghee 4y ago
The male sample has many pauses that are distractingly long. Pretty interesting.

londons_explore 4y ago

I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users. As a user focussed feature, it could read any audiobook out loud, and would differentiate apple books from any other audiobook platform. I guess it's aimed at authors, because then they can charge the author for the 'narration' service....

dmitriid 4y ago
> I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users. Licensing. Audiobooks are a different license from ebooks, and trying to narrate an audiobook will infringe the licensing terms.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Apple is big enough they could just tell authors "here is our new narration feature for users. If you don't like it, pull your books off our platform.". No author is going to win a twitter flame war because they don't want a 'speak it out loud' button provided by apple on their ebooks. Besides - all ebooks on Apple platforms already support this via: Settings → General → Accessibility → VoiceOver → ON turns on the VoiceOver feature This is just a higher quality version of the same.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    Your view is a bit myopic as you seem to assume Apple can just throw its weight at it and that winning in the US market would be the same as winning globally. Books are one of the oldest media around and as a consequence most jurisdictions have fairly extensive and specific laws around them and their authors' and publishers' rights. In many cases copyright itself is ultimately based on laws created to deal with authors and publishers. Infamously, Amazon tried to snub book pricing laws and lost. Google got into hot water with newspaper publishers because its news app violated laws originally written for citing physical newspapers. This is like suggesting Spotify just ignore the RIAA or Netflix should just stream all content in all countries, licensing restrictions be damned.
  - 4y ago

andy_ppp 4y ago

"Once your request is submitted, it takes one to two months to process the book and conduct quality checks." My guess is that these generated voices are far from perfect and someone has to go in and crank the algorithm to get a fair number of passages to not sound strange. Even in the example Helena there is a word at the end of a sentence that sounds like it should be in the middle and has a bit of weirdness to it. Still, very impressive, I think better than I remember Amazon Poly sounding.

qwerty456127 4y ago
Why is that we still can't have a perfect or near-perfect text-to-speech given all the astonishing advances in ML taking place? Is TTS an area nobody is really interested in or is it harder than generating beautiful pictures and sophisticated writings? This thing by Apple already sounds way better than the best I heard previously (NextUp Ivona) but it is not an instant-result offline tool yet and that's sad.
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  My uneducated opinion on the matter is that we are more tolerant of subtle errors in pictures and writings than we are in sounds. Subtle variations of tone can change the meaning of a conversation that words on paper just can't convey.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago
    As a person who has listened to a number of non-fiction books narrated by Microsoft Sam I don't really mind "subtle variations of tone" :-) This Apple thing will already satisfy me if they release it as an offline app for converting plain text files into audio files.
- justincormack 4y ago
  The pictures have weird limbs and the writing has errors. A book is long therefore there will be a lot of issues.
- 4y ago

33955985 4y ago

So happy to hear Apple putting African American voices front and center for this initiative. Along with Google’s push to make camera lenses / computational photography more accurate for darker skin (and Apple following suit) this feels like a real step forward for inclusion.

drexlspivey 4y ago
Voices have a race?
- vortegne 4y ago
  Often there are clear voice and accent differences. Are you saying there aren't? That would be a very strange statement.
  - mhuffman 4y ago
    Not so strange! ... at least when it comes to the legal community[1] (pdf). For those around during the O.J. Simpson trial, this was a very, very contentious topic during the trial! [1]https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl.edu/dist/3/2151/files/2019/09/amspeechbaugh.pdf https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl.edu/dist/3/2151/fi...
    - vortegne 4y ago
      I see your point. And of course it's not a 100% accurate thing, but you know what I mean. Being admissible in court as evidence and furthering representation of a group are two completely different things.
  - drexlspivey 4y ago
    Accent depends on where you were born/raised, not on your race.
    - 33955985 4y ago

mensetmanusman 4y ago

It would be great if these voices were Siri options. The new Siri choices are quite bad…

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Can it pronounce ”Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buff...

flakiness 4y ago

I hope Amazon does this too but probably they won't because it'll cannibalize Audible. This is good move from Apple. Take the credit!

mark_l_watson 4y ago

While TTS has broad application, I am skeptical about Apple’s process being able to compete with the best narrators. I have my biases. My wife and I have licenses to listen to about 500 Audible audio books and in the best of them I feel like I have a human to human relationship with the narrator that is similar to a relationship with the author. I have mostly worked on deep learning projects over the last eight years, so I appreciate the tech as an engineering tool, but I think it is important to view tech as a servant to human experience.

macintux 4y ago
Best narrators? Agreed. But as someone who did some recording for a local radio station years ago, it’s an incredibly time-intensive project to record a book.
RegnisGnaw 4y ago
Not every book can afford the best narrators. A good one charges somewhere in the ballpark of $300-500 a finished hour. So for an average novel that's like $3000-5000. Not all writers can afford that, so this is an cheaper alternative. Its like an Lexus vs Hyundai.

ghaff 4y ago

I'm skeptical given the state of the art. There is way more good audio content out there than I have the time/interest to listen too and I can't believe I'm that atypical. And a book is a relatively big listening time commitment. I'll happily pay a few dollars more for a good human narrator.

rickdeckard 4y ago
Indeed. But this option will only be available if a critical mass is also willing to pay a few dollars more for human narration. In times of flat-fee Audiobook platforms the pressure to bring down audiobook production costs will only increase, funding a full-fledged Audiobook production for each book will only become harder to justify. Moreover, looking at what Apple describes here, they seemingly want to establish digital narration (quality) as a metric for competition between Audiobook marketplaces, not publishers. So if this works out, the major platforms will compete on digital narration and publishers will have less incentive to actually produce an Audiobook with human narrators...
- ghaff 4y ago
  That's fair and it's true of a lot of AI/ML versions of content. I still paid for human transcriptions of podcasts when I was doing them because the time needed to clean up the ML versions just wasn't a good return. But the day will certainly come when that calculus changes. I know nothing about the economics of audiobooks. And will note that there are free public domain audio books already https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/. But TTS will improve and, at a minimum, improved TTS will be a benefit for people who can't read for various reasons.
  - rickdeckard 4y ago
    Well, an intent of Apple seems to be to break the price of an Audiobook into license and production cost, take control of the production using AI and pay only the publishing license, instead of having to buy the rights to sell an Audiobook as a separate work of Art (because in the end, their engine will create the work of Art from the written word). Sadly I don't see how this will make Audiobooks any better than human narration could. It's more about streaming platforms taking more control over the content and have experienced people train their proprietary TTS engine along the way. Just to avoid confusion on Librivox: They offer Audiobooks of works which are already in the public domain (so not only the Audiobook is in public domain, also the rights for the book have already expired). So it's a platform allowing people to make free narration of already-free content.

Hakeemmidan 4y ago

I regularly use my MacBook for narration. I look forward to this being better-adapted for books.

ivansavz 4y ago

Or you could use the command `say` on the command line on any current mac to get good-enough text-to-speech. See full script here: https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/de3ccb244224d101bb93320fee1cab39#file-txt2mp3-sh-L22-L23 https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/de3ccb244224d101bb93320... and this doc explains how you can setup a keyboard shortcut to turn any text selection into an audio book https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem8qpMmnaBFYOgV32gdMc/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem... Here is a sample if you want to hear what it sounds like: https://minireference.com/static/tmp/constructive_feedback.mp3 https://minireference.com/static/tmp/constructive_feedback.m... which is the audio from this blog post https://productivityhub.org/2019/04/19/how-to-deliver-constructive-feedback-in-difficult-situations/ https://productivityhub.org/2019/04/19/how-to-deliver-constr... IMHO, the computer generated voice like Alex (the default voice on mac OS) sounds better because it doesn't try to do inflections or add human character when it is reading. The real-world narrators (voice actors) seem to add too much "character" into their reading, which me distracts from the story/content. The only exception is when the narration is done by the author, in which case I'd consider the narration as part of the work.

hiidrew 4y ago
TIL. This is an interesting capability of the command line. Have any more fun ones? (at least fun to a CL noob)
- ivansavz 4y ago
  Here is another script `getmp3.sh` that you can use to download .mp3 file from any youtube music video: #!/usr/bin/env bash echo "Downloading mp3 from $1" yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 "$1" You'll need to install https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#installation https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#installation before you can use that. As you can see, the "script" is just so to add a options `-x` (extract audio) and `--audio-format mp3` to convert to mp3 in the end.
- macintux 4y ago
  I haven't figured out how to effectively search my HN favorites, else I'd probably be able to find a few more of these, but this was discussed recently: https://git.herrbischoff.com/awesome-macos-command-line/about/ https://git.herrbischoff.com/awesome-macos-command-line/abou...

dpratt 4y ago

“Mitchell” is clearly Ray Porter, an absolutely phenomenal voice actor/narrator. He’s done a range of audiobooks across many genres, and anything he does is a pleasure to listen to. I sure hope that he negotiated a gigantic amount for his data/training set provided to Apple, as this tech sounds like it’s getting advanced enough to obviate a giant chunk of the narration business overnight.

southp4w 4y ago
Just replied this to someone else. Instantly recognizable as Ray! Phenomenal narrator. He and Nick Podehl are my favorites

jensensbutton 4y ago

Tech doesn't seem that great? Google demo'd Duplex in 2018 and it was so good at voice synthesis that people were arguing about whether or not it's ethical to not disclaim you're talking to AI.

alanwreath 4y ago

I guess I kind of wish they would just offer the AI narration as a feature of Apple ebooks. Such that, if you buy the book, you can have ebooks read to you by your phone. I am really just buying books off audible with the subscription they offer. There are some books (tech books that is) that are offered as audio books and I gobble those up. There are, however, many more epub/digital books that I never buy not because I'm uninterested in the content but only because I don't have the time to sit down. I assume that for said books the audience isn't large enough (and may never be) to merit anyone ever recording the audiobook. There are certain books that I think I'll always buy the non-AI variant because narrators can bring more than natural reading, they sometimes bring different characters (sometimes more feminine, more baritone, more stereotypical accents) -- and I would melt if AI could do that kind of voice acting.

cjensen 4y ago
Amazon at one time tried to add voice reading to Kindle books. Authors were absolutely livid. Audiobooks are a significant income source, and taking that away from authors is going to make authors decline to sell digital books on your platform. Apple is doing this right by making it an author's choice.
- alanwreath 4y ago
  I totally see this point — I’m making a separate one for ebooks that aren’t getting purchased because they haven’t been (and probably never will be) narrated by a real human.
  - cjensen 4y ago
    I agree with you. Apple making this an author choice avoids some authors being angry while enabling more sales for lower-volume books that as you point out, will otherwise not have an spoken version.
layer8 4y ago
This should be a feature available for any text document. The existing iOS text-to-speech is almost barely adequate, but not really.

habosa 4y ago

Whoah the Madison voice sounds _exactly_ like Julia Whelan, who is a real audiobook narrator. I have listened to many articles on Audm (narrated news articles) using her voice. I wonder if she had a part in this?

urbandw311er 4y ago
If she did she’ll likely be NDA’d up to her neck to prevent her ever admitting it publicly.
southp4w 4y ago
The Mitchell voice also sounds almost exactly like Ray Porter, another real audiobook narrator.
- fuzzywalrus 4y ago
  I heard that and it was uncanny how much it sounded like ray porter to me

rahoulb 4y ago

I have to say that a number of audiobooks I've bought recently have been totally spoilt by the narration - and the AI voices on offer here all sound better than the humans involved in those books. I also remember reading, a couple of years ago, that Apple was working on improving the voices for Siri - resulting in me thinking "surely Apple has more important things to work on to improve Siri". I guess this was what they were actually aiming for.

mcphage 4y ago
> I guess this was what they were actually aiming for. I would imagine it was the other direction—that this is a way for them to test out their improvements to Siri.
Dig1t 4y ago
It's so true! It's such a tragedy when a really good book is ruined by bad narration. All of the Hitchhikers Guide books (except for the first one, which is masterfully read by Stephen Fry), are a good example, but there are tons of other examples. There's usually only one version as well so you can't even shop around for a version with a better narrator either.
- rahoulb 4y ago
  If you can find it, look for the BBC Radio version of Hitchhikers, from the late 70s, early 80s. Each version has a slightly different variation on the story and the radio one is my favourite of the lot. My friend had a copy of the scripts from the radio series and we used to use it as inspiration - "open the scripts at a random page and our band name will be the first thing that Marvin says ... Zootlewurdle - perfect!" I've got them on a set of CDs somewhere, but have nothing that will play them...
- dirtyid 4y ago
  I've learned to enjoy particularly robotic TTS narrations because after a while it becomes associated with my internal voice, and it feels like I'm "reading" the book versus elaborately produced audiobooks that are experiencially closer to enjoying a show. And feel less hesitation about listening at 3x speed. With practice, I can start layering on personality to different characters with neutral TTS voices.

WalterBright 4y ago

The first versions of Amazon's Kindle did this. Then they got mired in lawsuits over it from the book industry.

hintymad 4y ago
I had the same question, but Apple seems offer the narration to authors so they can choose whether a book comes with text to speech.
gdcbe 4y ago
Why the law suits. I would say: offer it with a big warning that this is automated and might be bad quality. Those books that have narrated versions can come with a buy extra button to have a professionally narrated version. For which I’m probably more then happy to pay. As an avid reader with 3 kids it’s nice to be able to switch between audio and text book, depending on my availability and context. As such of no professionaly narrated version is available am automated one is way better then nothing. Also, having the progress sync between digital text book and audio version is a great UX improvement!
- rockemsockem 4y ago
  The lawsuits were because Amazon just did it, without any author/publisher buy in. They just said "you can convert this ebook using our TTS with the kindle" and the publishers did *not* like that. IMO that is how this should work, any text anywhere should be convertible to auido.
  - gdcbe 4y ago
    It’s anyway just making it more difficult right, as ebooks can be converted anyway using an external program, many which have way to use gui’s. But i guess it’sas far as they can make use of liability laws
- potatolicious 4y ago
  > Why the law suits. Because the contracts between Amazon and the publishers do not permit this kind of work. Like, this is (legally) a pretty open and shut issue. Amazon has a license from the publisher for the book that permits a certain range of activities that are contemplated by the contract: showing short excerpts for marketing for example. IP licenses are carefully constructed, often because the rights are sold to different parties. You may for example license a book to adapt into a movie, but the contract would likely forbid you from adapting it for a TV show. The publisher may sell those two rights separately to two different parties. And these contracts likely either specifically forbid constructing an audiobook (automated or otherwise) from the original book, or at least do not contemplate it. That is a clear source of lawsuits where Amazon is likely clearly in the wrong. Another reply here mentions that the publishes do not "like" that Amazon went ahead and did this without consultation. That may very well be true - but more importantly (and constructively) it's likely that Amazon's behavior is specifically forbidden in the contract they voluntarily signed on to with the publisher.

SurgeArrest 4y ago

Would love to see one day AI used to read annotated text with multiple voices, so each person in a novel gets his/her voice and also narrative voice. Would be epic and actually better than most audio books read by a single person attempting to pretend to speak in different voices. Was always frustrated that Kindle was barred from reading books, it is such a natural progression of capabilities. Leave up to the buyer to decide if they want to pay for the person, but default TTS should be allowed for all books, such that if I read book at home and then can continue listening during a walk.

banana_giraffe 4y ago

The biggest failing for me: They don't appear to be making any attempt to have the narration use inflections for different characters. This is probably fine for nonfiction books, but for fiction books, it can make it really hard to follow when a narrator does this, at least for me.

visitect 4y ago
I understand this sentiment. I've been an audible subscriber since 2002 and have listened to hundreds of audiobooks, mostly fiction. The ability of the narrator to provide distinct, interesting voices for each character figures prominently into my enjoyment of a book. This technology sounds fantastic, and will likely enable pleasant narration of texts that would otherwise never have it, but I don't think it's likely to replace professional narrators for a large number of cases.

kmeisthax 4y ago

So at first I thought Apple had managed to undo the whole nonsense that book publishers strong-armed Amazon into doing where they can turn off TTS narration to make you buy the audiobook. But instead this seems to just be "hey if you want to use TTS instead of a paid narrator, you can". Already kinda shitty, but there's extra shit cherries on top: the resulting recording cannot be used on other book platforms. Only Apple Books and the DRM nonsense that killed public libraries. So it's also platform capitalist moat building, too - i.e. a scheme to deprive Amazon Audible of audiobooks. The more publishers opt to use Apple Books digital narration instead of paying a narrator, the less audiobooks will be available on Audible. And yes, you are allowed to still pay a narrator and distribute that recording on Audible, but... if you could do that, then obviously you wouldn't bother with Apple's TTS system. Of course, the flipside of this is that Amazon refuses to bother with copyright enforcement for books not on Audible. Cory Doctorow found this out the hard way[0]. If you do not license your work to Amazon, Amazon will pay someone else to copy it, and for some reason DMCA 512 protects them[1]. So I can see this winding up being a functionally unused service anyway. [0] https://www.audible.com/pd/Why-None-of-My-Books-Are-Available-on-Audible-Audiobook/B0B7KH8KSD?ref=a_author_Co_c19_lProduct_1_2&pf_rd_p=1ae0e65e-ad09-4aa7-aa73-772cefb1b5e1&pf_rd_r=N0PM6K7YC23JT308RPX7&pageLoadId=BxxuIctIJpGyXpHa&creativeId=73c32a9a-e504-4597-bb87-c30c58fc0204 https://www.audible.com/pd/Why-None-of-My-Books-Are-Availabl... [1] To be clear, I do not oppose DMCA 512; I just don't think DRM-bearing audiobook services that charge money should be allowed to disclaim copyright liability. DMCA 512 and 1201 should be mutually exclusive.

freyr 4y ago

It’s odd they label the voices as “soprano” and “baritone,” because they don’t sound like it. I suspect it’s to avoid labeling the speakers as “male” and “female.” What a joke.

thedailymail 4y ago

I'm curious about the thinking behind "mysteries and thrillers, and science fiction and fantasy are not currently supported." Is it because these genres use more non-standard words? Or is there more risk of the Apple voice being used to narrate sonething inappropriate?

barelysapient 4y ago

It’s the spaces between sentences and between pauses that need work. Usually a reader will take a breath or finish exhaling. Instead Apple’s audio drops to 0 db. It sounds unnatural. Mechanical.