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The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

403 points by isbn 3y ago

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yread 3y ago
Very cool. Although they shouldn't have even bothered with the poems, it sounds terrible https://archive.org/download/synapseml_gutenberg_a_bell_s_biography_by_nathaniel_hawthorn/a_bell_s_biography_by_nathaniel_hawthorn.mp3 https://archive.org/download/synapseml_gutenberg_a_bell_s_bi...
- saw-lau 3y ago
  I thought I'd look up something I knew and spotted 'Thérèse Raquin', which gets butchered into 'Rackwin'... some way to go yet, I think! https://ia804709.us.archive.org/35/items/synapseml_gutenberg_theresa_raquin_by_emile_zola/theresa_raquin_by_%C3%A9mile_zola.mp3 https://ia804709.us.archive.org/35/items/synapseml_gutenberg... (Hats off for the effort, though.)
didntcheck 3y ago
See also: Librivox [1], for public-domain audio books read by actual humans [1] https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/
- yorwba 3y ago
  Most likely the AI was actually trained on LibriVox, potentially even on largely the same books... EDIT: The first book on the list https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net/gutenberg-public/Website/browse.html https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net/gutenberg-pu... is "100%: the Story of a Patriot" and the LibriVox version is at https://librivox.org/100-the-story-of-a-patriot-by-upton-sinclair/ https://librivox.org/100-the-story-of-a-patriot-by-upton-sin...
  - DanielleMolloy 3y ago
    Not a good idea then. The librivox experience turned me away from professionally read audiobooks for far too long. Amateur readers are hit & miss. A lot of professional readers are actors or have a lot of experience. There is a reason people do pay for professionally read books instead of electronic reading or librivox only.
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  Are you a specist? Why should we value more an audiobook that's read by a human? Sorry, just joking. But here's a reason: these things were not quality-checked at all. Click on Moon Voyage by Jules Verne and be greeted with a very human-like voice reading an numbered list of "other works by the author" in an extremely awkward fashion that's probably caused by how the .TXT file is organized.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Thanks, I'm happy this exists. I think I'll start contributing this fall.
- bunderbunder 3y ago
  Lit2Go is also good: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/ https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/ The sibling poster is right, the quality varies. But the upper end of the quality range is really quite good. One of the best-read audiobooks I've ever heard was a Lit2Go edition of Pygmalion. And, for that matter, one of the worst-read audiobooks I've ever heard was an edition of an extremely famous and commercially successful book that I bought on Audible.
pjmlp 3y ago
Yet another example on how jobs will go away, goodbye voice actors.
- crop_rotation 3y ago
  True, and sadly they will go too quickly for voice actors to have any time to adapt.
- ghaff 3y ago
  It seems pretty obvious that, at least at this point, the competition is either people doing this sort of thing as a hobby or (maybe) at race to the bottom wages. (Or not at all--as is largely the case with machine transcription vs. human transcription.) If I want mediocre text to speech, I have that on my Kindle.
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  I am an avid consumer of audiobooks and I will never pay/listen to anything AI-generated. Maybe it's just me, I don't know, but just because they have shown that it is technically feasible, that doesn't mean that there is a market for it. I am skeptical. Listening to audiobooks is already a compromise over reading the book, listening to an AI-generated audiobook sounds to me like a bit too much. But let's see.
  - atrus 3y ago
    You'll never pay/listen to anything you're able to identify as AI-generated.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Obviously there are lots of short snippets of audio that are machine generated. But, no, at the current state of the art I'm not going to listen to a machine generated audiobook much less pay for it.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    I would agree but there is one big exception: books I really want to read but there's no audiobook version. I have a particular interest in early Mormon history and the history of the western US, and there are some really great books that aren't available as audio. I ended up generating some with aws and while the voice annoyed me, I was willing to do it, and the cost was much higher than a normal audiobook would cost. I think in reality, the more popular books will get a pro reading, but as long as it's labeled, there will be a market for ai audiobooks.
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The_suffocated 3y ago
Great news. It seems there is still much room for improvement, though. E.g. in “A Short History of the World” by H. G. Wells, the AI reads Darius I and Charles V as “Darius Eye” and “Charles Vee”. Open and closed brackets in sentences are not read out. The intonation is also a bit unnatural. But it is intelligent enough to parse 1,782 as 1782 rather than two numbers. Another problem is that the audio clips are not broken into sessions. There is no way to locate the beginning of a chapter, for instance.
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  I noticed the same, especially when some kind of structure text (like a bullet point or numbered list) comes in.
- deleted 3y ago
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- hedora 3y ago
  Some podcasts embed chapter start timestamps into the rss (atom? m3u?) metadata. That way, you get one file (and gapless playback), but most players have a chapter skip button that will do what you are asking for.
Borrible 3y ago
Sounded better than the handful of random corresponding Librivox recordings I listened to in order to compare them. To be honest, a lot of people go to great lengths to make Librivox recordings without having the skills to read aloud. Which is a pity, but nonetheless.
- jawns 3y ago
  I agree. I love the idea of Librivox, but the volunteers vary widely in quality. Some are non-native English speakers, some have lisps or other articulation problems, some have other marks of fluency deficiencies, some have under- or over-dramatic intonation, etc. And even if they're perfect voice actors, often their microphone setups are sub-par, and it comes through in the recording. Frankly, these AI voices are now at a level where the few mistakes they make are easier to forgive than some of those issues from human readers. That said, the final hurdle -- giving them the brains to know when to skip or resolve hiccups in the source material, such as typos, formatting issues, or text not intended to be read aloud -- is going to be very hard to overcome.
  - Borrible 3y ago
    Absolutely. So, will your books be available with an audio section as a free encore in the future? :)
  - everybodyknows 3y ago
    > hiccups in the source material From Joyce's Ulysses (capitalization possibly wrong): "nes. yo." Good luck with that!
- dirtyid 3y ago
  It's getting more passable. As someone who listens to a lot of TTS at high speed for years, eventually I adapted my brain do it and now it feels similar to phsyical reading with subvocalization where I can adjust the voices of characters. It's occasionally even preferrable, i.e. too much over produced podcasts these days where I just TTS the transcript.
xrd 3y ago
When I read Rikki Tikki Tavi to my 8 yr old daughter, we play a game. She asks me to change one of the words in the page and she tries to listen and see if she can figure it out. It is mentally taxing at the end of a long day to do that on the fly without pausing to figure out the word to slip in. And, my daughter is very sharp and catches them. I listened to a few of these. The voice sounds muted at times, as if the reader has a stuffy nose. H.G. Wells was read with a pause in between each period because it "thinks" that each letter boundary is a sentence change, which drove me batty. And, there is zero life in the stories. It might be a good thing to put in front of a kid to put them to sleep, maybe? But, it would not put me to sleep because it is just aggravating to listen to these stories stripped of all life by AI. Like Louis CK said: "Everything is amazing and no one is happy." I know this is incredible that AI can take in a transcript and produce something that most people would be able to distinguish between a real human. But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party.
- prepend 3y ago
  > But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party. I think the question is really “Will I be able to enjoy great books I otherwise would not have experienced?” For me, it’s not that these are superior or equivalent books to parents reading to their kid or voice actors; it’s whether I’ll listen to a book for free that I wouldn’t be able to afford $10-30.
  - low_tech_love 3y ago
    Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify). If you’re not willing to go even with that in order to listen to an actual human, then maybe yeah, you can try AI.
    - joshgachnang 3y ago
      It's not at all like Spotify. The library you get for $7.95/mo is very limited. If it was like Spotify I'd happily pay a hell of a lot more than that.
rhyme-boss 3y ago
Isn't listening to people tell stories fundamental to what we are? Wouldn't you rather be a part of a culture that cares about the difference between listening to a person's voice vs. a bot? Edit: My concern is audio files ending up in places where they aren't clearly labelled as AI-generated.
- brudgers 3y ago
  I think we should recognize that most choices are not between bread and cake. They are between bread and going hungry. I am not certain AI voiced audio books are better than nothing, but that's the way I'd bet. YMMV.
- chthonicdaemon 3y ago
  Do you have the same objection to reading transcripts?
  - rhyme-boss 3y ago
    Transcripts of what? I think stories are special, and I wouldn't lump them together with "all text".
8s2ngy 3y ago
Upon first impression, this is incredible! Audiobooks have enabled me to enjoy fiction books that I, otherwise, would not have been able to due to time constraints or other commitments. Perhaps, in the near future, AI will be able to make many obscure books that are collecting dust in museums and libraries accessible to the public through audiobooks. That is a future to look forward to.
Mistletoe 3y ago
I tried to listen to The Call of the Wild and it was impossible to follow since accents and emphasis on words are all wrong. I could barely understand the story. I guess AI has more work to do.
- ta8645 3y ago
  Yes, the voice sounds very natural and not computer-generated. But it gets a lot of, even simple, pronunciations wrong. There's a long way to go before this is genuinely an enjoyable and useful option.
artyn 3y ago
So many works are labeled [] or nan.
GrumpyNl 3y ago
Listening to a few of them, im amazed in what bad shape text to speech technology is. After all these years it still sounds robotic.
tmountain 3y ago
I was kind of hoping this was going to be human beings contributing read aloud versions of Gutenberg content. Since it’s not, I’ll propose a cool project. Raise money to enlist high quality voice actors to create audiobooks from Gutenberg. Release these audiobooks to the world for free. Which books come first could be voted upon. As someone who has used TTS a Lot in recent projects, I’m not excited about listening to AI read a book to me. It feels soulless.
- crop_rotation 3y ago
  I have used TTS in the past and in the last few years there has been a quantum leap in TTS quality. A similar such leap in the next few years and it will dominate the audiobook scene for good or bad.
  - hedora 3y ago
    AI might dominate, but it would be a loss. Here’s a tutorial explaining modern audio fiction: https://www.drabblecast.org/2018/07/30/inside-drabblecast-audio-2/ https://www.drabblecast.org/2018/07/30/inside-drabblecast-au... (In audio format, of course; roughly 1.5 hours) ———— This episode takes you inside Drabblecast audio production. Ever wonder how we produce an episode of the Drabblecast? Wonder no more! We dig into all the technical aspects like voice acting, sound editing and mixing, foley effects, music and more. Preproduction? Reading? Acting? Yeah, it’s all here folks, all the blood sweat and tears that go into every production of the Drabblecast.
    - crop_rotation 3y ago
      It might be worse than human narration, but at some point the economics becomes so loopsided that it's dominance is inevitable. One good thing I can see coming out of that will be an abundance of audiobooks of copyright expired books.
      - falcolas 3y ago
        Are the economics actually better, or do they look better due to a lack of quality control? Because no TTS - even the most current AI ones - are perfect. They need corrections, which involves a human's time. And it's time that dictates prices, not skill (which largely reduces time).
davidzweig 3y ago
Oh, snap, we've been working on importing Gutenburg to LR: https://www.languagereactor.com/m/t_en_- https://www.languagereactor.com/m/t_en_- We're ranking them using the download count, and also this prompt to chatGPT (it's primarily for language learners): "Is this text engaging and interesting for a modern reader, someone not into fine literature? Rate the text excellent, good, ok or poor. I don't want crusty, flowery, contorted language, talking about buttons and mannerisms and the hue of the sky etc." Then, we're rewriting the ~1000 most popular books using chatGPT to modernise/simplify the text. Using some markdown as an internal format, drawing from the gutenberg plain text and html formats, this will go to a github repo shortly. There's translations, and then, need to look at current best TTS voices.
- e12e 3y ago
  If you've already determined the text is interesting to the modern reader, why rewrite? Wouldn't it make more sense to look for texts that are thematically relevant, but with inaccessible language - and rewrite those? I still shudder to think how this system will handle something like Shakespeare's sonnets...
  - davidzweig 3y ago
    It's for students learning English. The top 1000 will be rewritten and be available in addition to the original version, and about another 10,000 available in original only (selected using vocabulary frequency analysis and the chatGPT query). Midsummer Night's Dream: THESEUS Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour Draws on apace; four happy days bring in Another moon: but, O, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires, Like to a step-dame or a dowager Long withering out a young man revenue. HIPPOLYTA Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities. Rewritten: THESEUS Now, dear Hippolyta, our wedding day is approaching quickly. In just four more happy days, a new moon will arrive. But oh, it feels like this current moon is taking forever to disappear! It's holding back my excitement, like an old, slow stepmother or a widow who keeps a young man's money for far too long. HIPPOLYTA Don't worry, Theseus. Four days will pass by in no time, and then four nights will also quickly slip away. After that, the new moon will shine brightly in the sky, like a freshly bent silver bow, and it will witness the night of our special celebration. Hmm. Shakespeare is the extreme case. It does make it more accessible. The style is lost. shrug
aedocw 3y ago
I put together a script to read epub books using Coqui TTS and I think the results are not far off from this. It's super quick if you've got a GPU, but it's reasonable too if it's just using CPU to do the text to speech. https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts
- kwerk 3y ago
  Does this handle text cleanup? Eg replace Roman numerals so they aren’t read literally etc? May need to dust off my Python for a Pr if not
  - aedocw 3y ago
    It does not handle that. A PR to replace stuff like that would be fantastic, I'd love it - please do!
j3d 3y ago
Shameless plug - if you download lots of audiobooks and need help organizing them and figuring out which to listen to next, check out Audiobook Locker: https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker. It's a desktop app (built with Tauri) that scans your audiobook folder and lets you sort, search and tag your audiobooks.
jcon321 3y ago
This is cool. Narration of audio books is a time consuming process! I agree with some of these comments here about how AI narration can sound robotic though and may not be too pleasant to listen to. However, for anyone who is, or knows a family member/friend with a certified disability, or is a veteran, there is a free program to listen to a vast collection of audio books (with real narration) provided by the US Government. Check out https://www.loc.gov/nls/ https://www.loc.gov/nls/ (Braille material too!)
- deleted 3y ago
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- taskforcegemini 3y ago
  >I agree with some of these comments here about how AI narration can sound robotic though and may not be too pleasant to listen to. I have encountered readers on librivox with such terrible pronunciation that following the story was rather difficult. on the other hand, a robotic voice could work well on some cyberpunk material
iandanforth 3y ago
The first example I clicked on turned out to be a super racist book! Luckily the narration was repetitive (like a record skipping), a tonal, and with prosody that chopped up sentences to the point of near intelligibility.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
I'm curious about the sub-domain https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net. Are these auto-generated? I'm guessing these style of subdomains are not named by a human.
- freeplay 3y ago
  Looks like Azure Blob Storage and 'marhamilresearch4' is the name of the storage account (think website hosted in a public S3 bucket). Azure requires these names are globally unique and only allows alphanumerics.
  - data_ders 3y ago
    this is likely Mark Hamilton's static site deployed from his own blob storage account https://github.com/mhamilton723 https://github.com/mhamilton723
olav 3y ago
The site is curiously broken in Safari browser.
mlhpdx 3y ago
In sampling a couple I would call these narrations "serviceable" rather than "high quality". My benchmark is the voice of my mom reading Shakespeare and Grahame, with intonation and voice to each character. Perhaps AI authored narration could do that, but these haven't.
sequoia 3y ago
This has dictation errors in the very first two words, in the title no less. https://ia801604.us.archive.org/29/items/synapseml_gutenberg_mrs_shelley_by_lucy_madox_brown_rossetti/mrs_shelley_by_lucy_madox_brown_rossetti.mp3 https://ia801604.us.archive.org/29/items/synapseml_gutenberg... "Mrs. [pause] Shelly by Lucy Maddox Brown Rosetti" I expected a bit better than this for a launch of "the next amazing cool thing"; distinguishing between full stops and honorifics seems pretty dang basic. As xrd said issues like this make the books unlistenable, it's too distracting and weird. didntcheck plugged librivox which is nice if mixed in terms of quality, I'd also plug "libby" for anyone who doesn't have it: check out audiobooks from your library.
hedora 3y ago
If you are looking for short stories, I strongly recommend audio fiction podcasts. Escape Artists is one of my favorite production houses. The recordings are creative commons licensed, and the authors (and other artists) get paid professional rates: https://escapeartists.net/ https://escapeartists.net/ Other sites to check out (all are donation-supported and pay authors): https://www.drabblecast.org/ https://www.drabblecast.org/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/podcasting/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/podcasting/ https://www.asimovs.com/more-stuff/podcasts/ https://www.asimovs.com/more-stuff/podcasts/ To give you an idea of what’s available, “Money in the Bank” by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling will likely sit well with the HN crowd: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/money-in-the-bank/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/money-in-the-bank... I could have picked literally 100’s of other stories; this one wins due to recency bias and the authors cyberpunk roots.
- jmspring 3y ago
  For horror short stories - I'm a fan of the "Horrorbabble" podcast - https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=horrorbabble+podcast https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=horrorb...
nineplay 3y ago
Anyone interested in free, well-narrated audiobooks should check out the Classic Tales podcast. I can't really say enough about it. The host is a fantastic narrator and the books range from Plutarch's Lives to Philip K Dick.
roguesupport 3y ago
[dead]
hospitalJail 3y ago
Oh man they have obscure Plato! I can't even spend money to get all of plato read.
i_am_a_squirrel 3y ago
Search > kritik der praktischen vernunft gutenberg and then go to 2:00 and listen until it says "Moral reason" it's a bit creepy :(
- deleted 3y ago
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andrewstuart 3y ago
I cannot listen to audiobooks read by text to speech they sound awful. Only human narrators are acceptable.
- tbalsam 3y ago
  https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1
- hackernj 3y ago
  Only professional, human narrators are acceptable to me. With few exceptions (e.g., Jimmy Carter), I can’t listen to an audiobook that was narrated by the author.
- bachmeier 3y ago
  I applaud the effort, but the voices are too distracting for me to focus for more than a minute.
cush 3y ago
The audio book for Project Hail Mary is brilliantly done with amazing voice acting and even uses effects on Rocky’s voice to emphasize his musicality. Listening to a good audio book is like listening to the perfect film adaptation - it adds to the reading experience. There’s a long, long way to go for AI to learn emotion before I’d spend 20+ hours listening to a book read by one.
- darknavi 3y ago
  Great example. I agree that Ray Porter knocked it out of the park with that book. Listen to this. Apple must of licensed his voice and while it is impressive, it goes to show how dead-pan the voice still is. "Mitchell, a digital voice" https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-aud...
_the_inflator 3y ago
Fantastic progress. Nevertheless, here is something for the internet veterans: Remember Microsoft Sam? MS came a long way to finally do good text to speech: https://youtu.be/3db_4xYahVc?si=SsXKvfHCabQ5rLef https://youtu.be/3db_4xYahVc?si=SsXKvfHCabQ5rLef Enjoy the ROFLcopter. ;)
sb057 3y ago
I picked Alice's Adventures in Wonderland[1] just to check out the quality and was met with: >Lice was beginning to get very >tired of sitting by her sister on >the bank and of having nothing >to do. Once or twice she had Great concept but jeez the execution leaves a lot to be desired. [1] https://ia801606.us.archive.org/35/items/synapseml_gutenberg_alice_s_adventures_in_wonderland_by_lewi/alice_s_adventures_in_wonderland_by_lewi.mp3 https://ia801606.us.archive.org/35/items/synapseml_gutenberg...
noufalibrahim 3y ago
A good human reader doesn't read as much as he dramatises the book. This conveys ideas and feelings more than what is just written. He takes liberties doing that which makes the narration interesting. I don't know if that's possible in the same way with an AI voice. I read to my kids often and try to dramatise the books in a similar way. The libre vox project which is contributer driven audio books is, I think, a more valuable contribution to human culture than AI generated audio files
- systemvoltage 3y ago
  Yeah it’s still robotic, I just tried. When enunciating long conjugate parts of a sentence such as “A long windy snow filled country road”, it doesn’t know that this is a one set of adjectives describing a country road. It’s a dead give away it’s AI. Maybe they can fix this.
  - noufalibrahim 3y ago
    I'm sure they will but even if they do and produce something that's exactly the same as a human narrator, there's something intangible that's lost. That's more or less my point. To make it even more intangible, I think the loss is greater to the narrator than to the listener as is the case with many of these AI generated creative pieces.
- klondike_klive 3y ago
  When I'm reading to my kid I can respond to the situation too. We're currently going through the Chronicles of Narnia, and are finishing up the second book (The Magician's Nephew). I'll do different voices for each character (I'm a professional voice actor). But we've noticed that close to bedtime it can have an enlivening effect so that it keeps him awake, so I'll just read the voices in my normal narrator voice.
  - noufalibrahim 3y ago
    That's sweet. The "negative" effects of being too good at your job. :)
ferfumarma 3y ago
Thirty five seconds in to the very first link [1] and I hear the phrase "kon-fee de rate". It took me five seconds to realize the AI can't pronounce "confederate". [1] https://archive.org/download/synapseml_gutenberg__quot_run_to_seed_quot_by_thomas_nelson/_quot_run_to_seed_quot_by_thomas_nelson.mp3 https://archive.org/download/synapseml_gutenberg__quot_run_t...
korginator 3y ago
I'm not even sure what this project is supposed to accomplish. I tried a few books, and gave up within a few seconds. Pauses and punctuations, intonations, the spacing of words, and a whole lot more are really out of whack - it takes me a lot of effort at times to figure out what's being said. After a short while, it was really starting to stress me out so I gave up.
8bitsrule 3y ago
Some human book readers have a lot more than accurate reading skills. (Can even read a title like 'Astounding Science...' (without the 3 second pause before) 'Fiction September 1959'.) https://ia801608.us.archive.org/25/items/synapseml_gutenberg_a_matter_of_importance_by_murray_leinste/a_matter_of_importance_by_murray_leinste.mp3 https://ia801608.us.archive.org/25/items/synapseml_gutenberg... They have wonderful voice acting skills as well. They can create multiple character voices and personalities. They can detect and express emotions appropriately, without hints from the text. They'll continue to be highly valued, and far more enjoyable to listen to, for a -long- time.
fireruby 3y ago
Exactly the same scene as I use in my daily life. It feels great to have an audiobook version of any e-book. You don’t have to wait/look for any real person to complete their audio work. I have used this tool [1] to convert and listen to many books. 1. https://github.com/p0n1/epub_to_audiobook https://github.com/p0n1/epub_to_audiobook EPUB to audiobook converter with Azure TTS, optimized for Audiobookshelf.
mhamilton723 3y ago
Hi all, we created this work and are happy to answer any questions!

403 points by isbn 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Very cool. Although they shouldn't have even bothered with the poems, it sounds terrible https://archive.org/download/synapseml_gutenberg_a_bell_s_biography_by_nathaniel_hawthorn/a_bell_s_biography_by_nathaniel_hawthorn.mp3 https://archive.org/download/synapseml_gutenberg_a_bell_s_bi...

saw-lau 3y ago
I thought I'd look up something I knew and spotted 'Thérèse Raquin', which gets butchered into 'Rackwin'... some way to go yet, I think! https://ia804709.us.archive.org/35/items/synapseml_gutenberg_theresa_raquin_by_emile_zola/theresa_raquin_by_%C3%A9mile_zola.mp3 https://ia804709.us.archive.org/35/items/synapseml_gutenberg... (Hats off for the effort, though.)

didntcheck 3y ago

See also: Librivox [1], for public-domain audio books read by actual humans [1] https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/

yorwba 3y ago
Most likely the AI was actually trained on LibriVox, potentially even on largely the same books... EDIT: The first book on the list https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net/gutenberg-public/Website/browse.html https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net/gutenberg-pu... is "100%: the Story of a Patriot" and the LibriVox version is at https://librivox.org/100-the-story-of-a-patriot-by-upton-sinclair/ https://librivox.org/100-the-story-of-a-patriot-by-upton-sin...
- DanielleMolloy 3y ago
  Not a good idea then. The librivox experience turned me away from professionally read audiobooks for far too long. Amateur readers are hit & miss. A lot of professional readers are actors or have a lot of experience. There is a reason people do pay for professionally read books instead of electronic reading or librivox only.
low_tech_love 3y ago
Are you a specist? Why should we value more an audiobook that's read by a human? Sorry, just joking. But here's a reason: these things were not quality-checked at all. Click on Moon Voyage by Jules Verne and be greeted with a very human-like voice reading an numbered list of "other works by the author" in an extremely awkward fashion that's probably caused by how the .TXT file is organized.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Thanks, I'm happy this exists. I think I'll start contributing this fall.
bunderbunder 3y ago
Lit2Go is also good: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/ https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/ The sibling poster is right, the quality varies. But the upper end of the quality range is really quite good. One of the best-read audiobooks I've ever heard was a Lit2Go edition of Pygmalion. And, for that matter, one of the worst-read audiobooks I've ever heard was an edition of an extremely famous and commercially successful book that I bought on Audible.

pjmlp 3y ago

Yet another example on how jobs will go away, goodbye voice actors.

crop_rotation 3y ago
True, and sadly they will go too quickly for voice actors to have any time to adapt.
ghaff 3y ago
It seems pretty obvious that, at least at this point, the competition is either people doing this sort of thing as a hobby or (maybe) at race to the bottom wages. (Or not at all--as is largely the case with machine transcription vs. human transcription.) If I want mediocre text to speech, I have that on my Kindle.
low_tech_love 3y ago
I am an avid consumer of audiobooks and I will never pay/listen to anything AI-generated. Maybe it's just me, I don't know, but just because they have shown that it is technically feasible, that doesn't mean that there is a market for it. I am skeptical. Listening to audiobooks is already a compromise over reading the book, listening to an AI-generated audiobook sounds to me like a bit too much. But let's see.
- atrus 3y ago
  You'll never pay/listen to anything you're able to identify as AI-generated.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Obviously there are lots of short snippets of audio that are machine generated. But, no, at the current state of the art I'm not going to listen to a machine generated audiobook much less pay for it.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I would agree but there is one big exception: books I really want to read but there's no audiobook version. I have a particular interest in early Mormon history and the history of the western US, and there are some really great books that aren't available as audio. I ended up generating some with aws and while the voice annoyed me, I was willing to do it, and the cost was much higher than a normal audiobook would cost. I think in reality, the more popular books will get a pro reading, but as long as it's labeled, there will be a market for ai audiobooks.

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The_suffocated 3y ago

Great news. It seems there is still much room for improvement, though. E.g. in “A Short History of the World” by H. G. Wells, the AI reads Darius I and Charles V as “Darius Eye” and “Charles Vee”. Open and closed brackets in sentences are not read out. The intonation is also a bit unnatural. But it is intelligent enough to parse 1,782 as 1782 rather than two numbers. Another problem is that the audio clips are not broken into sessions. There is no way to locate the beginning of a chapter, for instance.

low_tech_love 3y ago
I noticed the same, especially when some kind of structure text (like a bullet point or numbered list) comes in.
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hedora 3y ago
Some podcasts embed chapter start timestamps into the rss (atom? m3u?) metadata. That way, you get one file (and gapless playback), but most players have a chapter skip button that will do what you are asking for.

Borrible 3y ago

Sounded better than the handful of random corresponding Librivox recordings I listened to in order to compare them. To be honest, a lot of people go to great lengths to make Librivox recordings without having the skills to read aloud. Which is a pity, but nonetheless.

jawns 3y ago
I agree. I love the idea of Librivox, but the volunteers vary widely in quality. Some are non-native English speakers, some have lisps or other articulation problems, some have other marks of fluency deficiencies, some have under- or over-dramatic intonation, etc. And even if they're perfect voice actors, often their microphone setups are sub-par, and it comes through in the recording. Frankly, these AI voices are now at a level where the few mistakes they make are easier to forgive than some of those issues from human readers. That said, the final hurdle -- giving them the brains to know when to skip or resolve hiccups in the source material, such as typos, formatting issues, or text not intended to be read aloud -- is going to be very hard to overcome.
- Borrible 3y ago
  Absolutely. So, will your books be available with an audio section as a free encore in the future? :)
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  > hiccups in the source material From Joyce's Ulysses (capitalization possibly wrong): "nes. yo." Good luck with that!
dirtyid 3y ago
It's getting more passable. As someone who listens to a lot of TTS at high speed for years, eventually I adapted my brain do it and now it feels similar to phsyical reading with subvocalization where I can adjust the voices of characters. It's occasionally even preferrable, i.e. too much over produced podcasts these days where I just TTS the transcript.

xrd 3y ago

When I read Rikki Tikki Tavi to my 8 yr old daughter, we play a game. She asks me to change one of the words in the page and she tries to listen and see if she can figure it out. It is mentally taxing at the end of a long day to do that on the fly without pausing to figure out the word to slip in. And, my daughter is very sharp and catches them. I listened to a few of these. The voice sounds muted at times, as if the reader has a stuffy nose. H.G. Wells was read with a pause in between each period because it "thinks" that each letter boundary is a sentence change, which drove me batty. And, there is zero life in the stories. It might be a good thing to put in front of a kid to put them to sleep, maybe? But, it would not put me to sleep because it is just aggravating to listen to these stories stripped of all life by AI. Like Louis CK said: "Everything is amazing and no one is happy." I know this is incredible that AI can take in a transcript and produce something that most people would be able to distinguish between a real human. But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party.

prepend 3y ago
> But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party. I think the question is really “Will I be able to enjoy great books I otherwise would not have experienced?” For me, it’s not that these are superior or equivalent books to parents reading to their kid or voice actors; it’s whether I’ll listen to a book for free that I wouldn’t be able to afford $10-30.
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify). If you’re not willing to go even with that in order to listen to an actual human, then maybe yeah, you can try AI.
  - joshgachnang 3y ago
    It's not at all like Spotify. The library you get for $7.95/mo is very limited. If it was like Spotify I'd happily pay a hell of a lot more than that.

rhyme-boss 3y ago

Isn't listening to people tell stories fundamental to what we are? Wouldn't you rather be a part of a culture that cares about the difference between listening to a person's voice vs. a bot? Edit: My concern is audio files ending up in places where they aren't clearly labelled as AI-generated.

brudgers 3y ago
I think we should recognize that most choices are not between bread and cake. They are between bread and going hungry. I am not certain AI voiced audio books are better than nothing, but that's the way I'd bet. YMMV.
chthonicdaemon 3y ago
Do you have the same objection to reading transcripts?
- rhyme-boss 3y ago
  Transcripts of what? I think stories are special, and I wouldn't lump them together with "all text".

8s2ngy 3y ago

Upon first impression, this is incredible! Audiobooks have enabled me to enjoy fiction books that I, otherwise, would not have been able to due to time constraints or other commitments. Perhaps, in the near future, AI will be able to make many obscure books that are collecting dust in museums and libraries accessible to the public through audiobooks. That is a future to look forward to.

Mistletoe 3y ago

I tried to listen to The Call of the Wild and it was impossible to follow since accents and emphasis on words are all wrong. I could barely understand the story. I guess AI has more work to do.

ta8645 3y ago
Yes, the voice sounds very natural and not computer-generated. But it gets a lot of, even simple, pronunciations wrong. There's a long way to go before this is genuinely an enjoyable and useful option.

artyn 3y ago

So many works are labeled [] or nan.

GrumpyNl 3y ago

Listening to a few of them, im amazed in what bad shape text to speech technology is. After all these years it still sounds robotic.

tmountain 3y ago

I was kind of hoping this was going to be human beings contributing read aloud versions of Gutenberg content. Since it’s not, I’ll propose a cool project. Raise money to enlist high quality voice actors to create audiobooks from Gutenberg. Release these audiobooks to the world for free. Which books come first could be voted upon. As someone who has used TTS a Lot in recent projects, I’m not excited about listening to AI read a book to me. It feels soulless.

crop_rotation 3y ago
I have used TTS in the past and in the last few years there has been a quantum leap in TTS quality. A similar such leap in the next few years and it will dominate the audiobook scene for good or bad.
- hedora 3y ago
  AI might dominate, but it would be a loss. Here’s a tutorial explaining modern audio fiction: https://www.drabblecast.org/2018/07/30/inside-drabblecast-audio-2/ https://www.drabblecast.org/2018/07/30/inside-drabblecast-au... (In audio format, of course; roughly 1.5 hours) ———— This episode takes you inside Drabblecast audio production. Ever wonder how we produce an episode of the Drabblecast? Wonder no more! We dig into all the technical aspects like voice acting, sound editing and mixing, foley effects, music and more. Preproduction? Reading? Acting? Yeah, it’s all here folks, all the blood sweat and tears that go into every production of the Drabblecast.
  - crop_rotation 3y ago
    It might be worse than human narration, but at some point the economics becomes so loopsided that it's dominance is inevitable. One good thing I can see coming out of that will be an abundance of audiobooks of copyright expired books.
    - falcolas 3y ago
      Are the economics actually better, or do they look better due to a lack of quality control? Because no TTS - even the most current AI ones - are perfect. They need corrections, which involves a human's time. And it's time that dictates prices, not skill (which largely reduces time).

davidzweig 3y ago

Oh, snap, we've been working on importing Gutenburg to LR: https://www.languagereactor.com/m/t_en_- https://www.languagereactor.com/m/t_en_- We're ranking them using the download count, and also this prompt to chatGPT (it's primarily for language learners): "Is this text engaging and interesting for a modern reader, someone not into fine literature? Rate the text excellent, good, ok or poor. I don't want crusty, flowery, contorted language, talking about buttons and mannerisms and the hue of the sky etc." Then, we're rewriting the ~1000 most popular books using chatGPT to modernise/simplify the text. Using some markdown as an internal format, drawing from the gutenberg plain text and html formats, this will go to a github repo shortly. There's translations, and then, need to look at current best TTS voices.

e12e 3y ago
If you've already determined the text is interesting to the modern reader, why rewrite? Wouldn't it make more sense to look for texts that are thematically relevant, but with inaccessible language - and rewrite those? I still shudder to think how this system will handle something like Shakespeare's sonnets...
- davidzweig 3y ago
  It's for students learning English. The top 1000 will be rewritten and be available in addition to the original version, and about another 10,000 available in original only (selected using vocabulary frequency analysis and the chatGPT query). Midsummer Night's Dream: THESEUS Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour Draws on apace; four happy days bring in Another moon: but, O, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires, Like to a step-dame or a dowager Long withering out a young man revenue. HIPPOLYTA Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities. Rewritten: THESEUS Now, dear Hippolyta, our wedding day is approaching quickly. In just four more happy days, a new moon will arrive. But oh, it feels like this current moon is taking forever to disappear! It's holding back my excitement, like an old, slow stepmother or a widow who keeps a young man's money for far too long. HIPPOLYTA Don't worry, Theseus. Four days will pass by in no time, and then four nights will also quickly slip away. After that, the new moon will shine brightly in the sky, like a freshly bent silver bow, and it will witness the night of our special celebration. Hmm. Shakespeare is the extreme case. It does make it more accessible. The style is lost. shrug

aedocw 3y ago

I put together a script to read epub books using Coqui TTS and I think the results are not far off from this. It's super quick if you've got a GPU, but it's reasonable too if it's just using CPU to do the text to speech. https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts

kwerk 3y ago
Does this handle text cleanup? Eg replace Roman numerals so they aren’t read literally etc? May need to dust off my Python for a Pr if not
- aedocw 3y ago
  It does not handle that. A PR to replace stuff like that would be fantastic, I'd love it - please do!

j3d 3y ago

Shameless plug - if you download lots of audiobooks and need help organizing them and figuring out which to listen to next, check out Audiobook Locker: https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker. It's a desktop app (built with Tauri) that scans your audiobook folder and lets you sort, search and tag your audiobooks.

jcon321 3y ago

This is cool. Narration of audio books is a time consuming process! I agree with some of these comments here about how AI narration can sound robotic though and may not be too pleasant to listen to. However, for anyone who is, or knows a family member/friend with a certified disability, or is a veteran, there is a free program to listen to a vast collection of audio books (with real narration) provided by the US Government. Check out https://www.loc.gov/nls/ https://www.loc.gov/nls/ (Braille material too!)

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taskforcegemini 3y ago
>I agree with some of these comments here about how AI narration can sound robotic though and may not be too pleasant to listen to. I have encountered readers on librivox with such terrible pronunciation that following the story was rather difficult. on the other hand, a robotic voice could work well on some cyberpunk material

iandanforth 3y ago

The first example I clicked on turned out to be a super racist book! Luckily the narration was repetitive (like a record skipping), a tonal, and with prosody that chopped up sentences to the point of near intelligibility.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

I'm curious about the sub-domain https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net. Are these auto-generated? I'm guessing these style of subdomains are not named by a human.

freeplay 3y ago
Looks like Azure Blob Storage and 'marhamilresearch4' is the name of the storage account (think website hosted in a public S3 bucket). Azure requires these names are globally unique and only allows alphanumerics.
- data_ders 3y ago
  this is likely Mark Hamilton's static site deployed from his own blob storage account https://github.com/mhamilton723 https://github.com/mhamilton723

olav 3y ago

The site is curiously broken in Safari browser.

mlhpdx 3y ago

In sampling a couple I would call these narrations "serviceable" rather than "high quality". My benchmark is the voice of my mom reading Shakespeare and Grahame, with intonation and voice to each character. Perhaps AI authored narration could do that, but these haven't.

sequoia 3y ago

This has dictation errors in the very first two words, in the title no less. https://ia801604.us.archive.org/29/items/synapseml_gutenberg_mrs_shelley_by_lucy_madox_brown_rossetti/mrs_shelley_by_lucy_madox_brown_rossetti.mp3 https://ia801604.us.archive.org/29/items/synapseml_gutenberg... "Mrs. [pause] Shelly by Lucy Maddox Brown Rosetti" I expected a bit better than this for a launch of "the next amazing cool thing"; distinguishing between full stops and honorifics seems pretty dang basic. As xrd said issues like this make the books unlistenable, it's too distracting and weird. didntcheck plugged librivox which is nice if mixed in terms of quality, I'd also plug "libby" for anyone who doesn't have it: check out audiobooks from your library.

hedora 3y ago

If you are looking for short stories, I strongly recommend audio fiction podcasts. Escape Artists is one of my favorite production houses. The recordings are creative commons licensed, and the authors (and other artists) get paid professional rates: https://escapeartists.net/ https://escapeartists.net/ Other sites to check out (all are donation-supported and pay authors): https://www.drabblecast.org/ https://www.drabblecast.org/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/podcasting/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/podcasting/ https://www.asimovs.com/more-stuff/podcasts/ https://www.asimovs.com/more-stuff/podcasts/ To give you an idea of what’s available, “Money in the Bank” by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling will likely sit well with the HN crowd: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/money-in-the-bank/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/money-in-the-bank... I could have picked literally 100’s of other stories; this one wins due to recency bias and the authors cyberpunk roots.

jmspring 3y ago
For horror short stories - I'm a fan of the "Horrorbabble" podcast - https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=horrorbabble+podcast https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=horrorb...

nineplay 3y ago

Anyone interested in free, well-narrated audiobooks should check out the Classic Tales podcast. I can't really say enough about it. The host is a fantastic narrator and the books range from Plutarch's Lives to Philip K Dick.

roguesupport 3y ago

[dead]

hospitalJail 3y ago

Oh man they have obscure Plato! I can't even spend money to get all of plato read.

i_am_a_squirrel 3y ago

Search > kritik der praktischen vernunft gutenberg and then go to 2:00 and listen until it says "Moral reason" it's a bit creepy :(

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andrewstuart 3y ago

I cannot listen to audiobooks read by text to speech they sound awful. Only human narrators are acceptable.

tbalsam 3y ago
https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1
hackernj 3y ago
Only professional, human narrators are acceptable to me. With few exceptions (e.g., Jimmy Carter), I can’t listen to an audiobook that was narrated by the author.
bachmeier 3y ago
I applaud the effort, but the voices are too distracting for me to focus for more than a minute.

cush 3y ago

The audio book for Project Hail Mary is brilliantly done with amazing voice acting and even uses effects on Rocky’s voice to emphasize his musicality. Listening to a good audio book is like listening to the perfect film adaptation - it adds to the reading experience. There’s a long, long way to go for AI to learn emotion before I’d spend 20+ hours listening to a book read by one.

darknavi 3y ago
Great example. I agree that Ray Porter knocked it out of the park with that book. Listen to this. Apple must of licensed his voice and while it is impressive, it goes to show how dead-pan the voice still is. "Mitchell, a digital voice" https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-aud...

_the_inflator 3y ago

Fantastic progress. Nevertheless, here is something for the internet veterans: Remember Microsoft Sam? MS came a long way to finally do good text to speech: https://youtu.be/3db_4xYahVc?si=SsXKvfHCabQ5rLef https://youtu.be/3db_4xYahVc?si=SsXKvfHCabQ5rLef Enjoy the ROFLcopter. ;)

sb057 3y ago

I picked Alice's Adventures in Wonderland[1] just to check out the quality and was met with: >Lice was beginning to get very >tired of sitting by her sister on >the bank and of having nothing >to do. Once or twice she had Great concept but jeez the execution leaves a lot to be desired. [1] https://ia801606.us.archive.org/35/items/synapseml_gutenberg_alice_s_adventures_in_wonderland_by_lewi/alice_s_adventures_in_wonderland_by_lewi.mp3 https://ia801606.us.archive.org/35/items/synapseml_gutenberg...

noufalibrahim 3y ago

A good human reader doesn't read as much as he dramatises the book. This conveys ideas and feelings more than what is just written. He takes liberties doing that which makes the narration interesting. I don't know if that's possible in the same way with an AI voice. I read to my kids often and try to dramatise the books in a similar way. The libre vox project which is contributer driven audio books is, I think, a more valuable contribution to human culture than AI generated audio files

systemvoltage 3y ago
Yeah it’s still robotic, I just tried. When enunciating long conjugate parts of a sentence such as “A long windy snow filled country road”, it doesn’t know that this is a one set of adjectives describing a country road. It’s a dead give away it’s AI. Maybe they can fix this.
- noufalibrahim 3y ago
  I'm sure they will but even if they do and produce something that's exactly the same as a human narrator, there's something intangible that's lost. That's more or less my point. To make it even more intangible, I think the loss is greater to the narrator than to the listener as is the case with many of these AI generated creative pieces.
klondike_klive 3y ago
When I'm reading to my kid I can respond to the situation too. We're currently going through the Chronicles of Narnia, and are finishing up the second book (The Magician's Nephew). I'll do different voices for each character (I'm a professional voice actor). But we've noticed that close to bedtime it can have an enlivening effect so that it keeps him awake, so I'll just read the voices in my normal narrator voice.
- noufalibrahim 3y ago
  That's sweet. The "negative" effects of being too good at your job. :)

ferfumarma 3y ago

Thirty five seconds in to the very first link [1] and I hear the phrase "kon-fee de rate". It took me five seconds to realize the AI can't pronounce "confederate". [1] https://archive.org/download/synapseml_gutenberg__quot_run_to_seed_quot_by_thomas_nelson/_quot_run_to_seed_quot_by_thomas_nelson.mp3 https://archive.org/download/synapseml_gutenberg__quot_run_t...

korginator 3y ago

I'm not even sure what this project is supposed to accomplish. I tried a few books, and gave up within a few seconds. Pauses and punctuations, intonations, the spacing of words, and a whole lot more are really out of whack - it takes me a lot of effort at times to figure out what's being said. After a short while, it was really starting to stress me out so I gave up.

8bitsrule 3y ago

Some human book readers have a lot more than accurate reading skills. (Can even read a title like 'Astounding Science...' (without the 3 second pause before) 'Fiction September 1959'.) https://ia801608.us.archive.org/25/items/synapseml_gutenberg_a_matter_of_importance_by_murray_leinste/a_matter_of_importance_by_murray_leinste.mp3 https://ia801608.us.archive.org/25/items/synapseml_gutenberg... They have wonderful voice acting skills as well. They can create multiple character voices and personalities. They can detect and express emotions appropriately, without hints from the text. They'll continue to be highly valued, and far more enjoyable to listen to, for a -long- time.

fireruby 3y ago

Exactly the same scene as I use in my daily life. It feels great to have an audiobook version of any e-book. You don’t have to wait/look for any real person to complete their audio work. I have used this tool [1] to convert and listen to many books. 1. https://github.com/p0n1/epub_to_audiobook https://github.com/p0n1/epub_to_audiobook EPUB to audiobook converter with Azure TTS, optimized for Audiobookshelf.

mhamilton723 3y ago

Hi all, we created this work and are happy to answer any questions!