[HN Gopher] Apple Books digital narration
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Apple Books digital narration
Author : alienreborn
Score : 264 points
Date : 2023-01-05 05:56 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (authors.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (authors.apple.com)
| ivan_ah wrote:
| 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/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/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...
|
| Here is a sample if you want to hear what it sounds like:
| 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-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 wrote:
| TIL. This is an interesting capability of the command line.
| Have any more fun ones? (at least fun to a CL noob)
| macintux wrote:
| 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/abou...
| ivan_ah wrote:
| 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 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.
| scinerio wrote:
| I personally find that lack of character and inflections has
| completely turned me off of audiobooks in favor of podcasting.
| The typical monotone audio narration causes me to zone out into
| other thoughts and I find myself rewinding or just turning it
| off.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| I've experienced that too, but only for "bad writing."
|
| I'm normally able to follow narrative (both fiction and non-
| fiction) that has something to teach, and also enjoying
| listening to classic literature no problem...
|
| But sometimes I'm reading a long article from the internet
| and I experience what you describe (losing track of what
| author is saying, having to rewind to get the point). After a
| while, I realize it's not the computer's fault, but the
| article is just very low content (e.g. some authors just pile
| on words, emotions, opinions without a coherent narrative or
| point). Recently I noticed I'm able to detect GPT-generated
| text this way too... words without content or message.
|
| Perhaps the monotone TTS can be a test for the "meaning"
| contents of a text.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| If you're still interested, give graphic audio a try. They're
| full-cast (usually a different reader for each character)
| high production quality audiobooks. They cost accordingly too
| though.
|
| https://www.graphicaudio.net/
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| 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.
| macintux wrote:
| 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.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| 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.
| carlob wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > It was killed by publishers who wanted to charge separately
| for audiobooks.
|
| Any sources on this?
| [deleted]
| bentley wrote:
| _Amazon decides Kindle speech isn't worth copyright fight_
| (2009) -- 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-
| pub...
| shrx wrote:
| Thanks. I never really used Kindle Speech on my 3G Kindle,
| but was curious why it was suddenly gone in later versions.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| licensing as in?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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-
| 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_.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Samples from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253424
|
| Male: https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/pale-moon-
| rising/id1640...
|
| Female: https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/shelter-from-the-
| storm/...
| dmazin wrote:
| Woah, the Madison voice is quite clearly Julia Whelan.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Mitchell sounds like Alan Rickman, I felt like I was hearing
| Snape reading the sentence. I like it
| habosa wrote:
| 100%, I noticed it immediately.
| londons_explore wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Veen wrote:
| It's not big enough to to tell the major publishers that.
| Especially if it wants mainstream titles on its relatively
| small ebook platform.
| hnbad wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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.".
|
| You assume that it is authors who sell books on Apple
| platform (or on any platform).
|
| Let me introduce you to a couple of chunky boys:
|
| - Penguin Random House
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Random_House
|
| - HarperCollins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarperCollins
|
| - Simon & Schuster
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_%26_Schuster
| 33955985 wrote:
| Apple is big enough to have the EU dictate what port to
| ship their phones with, too. The regulatory landscape
| requires careful navigating.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Apple would absolutely get sued by publishers, but, I don't
| think that Apple providing a high quality narration tool with
| their phone which can be used on any ebook would infringe
| licensing terms. It's not like they'd be saying "Here is this
| specific title for you to read/buy/rent", they'd be releasing
| a tool with the power to do that.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I don't think that Apple providing a high quality
| narration tool with their phone which can be used on any
| ebook would infringe licensing terms.
|
| Oh, it definitely would. This produces a derivative work
| besides anything else.
|
| > It's not like they'd be saying "Here is this specific
| title for you to read/buy/rent", they'd be releasing a tool
| with the power to do that.
|
| That's exactly what they will be doing from the point of
| view of copyright law.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Citation needed?
|
| TTS tools exist on all computing platforms these days.
| The difference with this recent release is just that it
| sounds better. Apple would not be creating a derivative
| work, whoever uses it would be.
|
| EDIT: It has occurred to me that they may have signed a
| deal as part of Apple Books that says they won't release
| tools of this nature. I don't know if that is the case,
| but that isn't the scenario I'm talking about. Just the
| case where there is a tool that can do high quality TTS.
| I do not believe that violates any copyright since it's a
| tool.
| dpratt wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Just replied this to someone else. Instantly recognizable as
| Ray! Phenomenal narrator. He and Nick Podehl are my favorites
| nstart wrote:
| 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). 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 wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| 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/.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| troupe wrote:
| I often find books I want to read that don't have audio
| versions or the audio version is for a different translation
| than what I want to read. So if you are looking for specific
| things to read the (eventual) use of this type of technology to
| open up some of those in audio format seems useful.
|
| (But totally agree with you that this isn't going to replace a
| good human narrator.)
| thomasahle wrote:
| I have a bunch of books on my "to read" list, that still don't
| have a narration. I would happily listen to an AI version as an
| alternative.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/. But TTS will improve and, at a
| minimum, improved TTS will be a benefit for people who can't
| read for various reasons.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| 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.
| falcolas wrote:
| A couple of comments from a narrator whose worked through ACX
| before.
|
| First, the last few years have seen a race to the bottom for
| narrator rates, since during the pandemic it was recognized
| that it's a job that can be easily done from home, literally
| from anywhere in the world.
|
| Accordingly, the up-front cost for an average quality 10 hour
| book is only about $1,500, and can be turned around in under
| two weeks from a human. If you get a really good and well known
| narrator, it's still only about $4,000 (and you'll probably get
| it quicker).
|
| Also, they're going to be competing against revenue share
| models from Amazon/Audible, which basically means it costs the
| author nothing up front. Amazon's bite out of audiobook sales
| is absurdly high (60%), so other companies could (and are)
| definitely improve on that. It's mostly a fight against
| Audible's brand at this point.
|
| But back to AI: AI narration is going to have to compete
| against humans willing to do a lot of work for very little pay.
| I'm honestly not sure the compute and QA costs will be
| competitive. And frankly, even if it is cheaper, it's not as if
| those savings will be passed back to the customer.
|
| If you'd like to look at how little it can cost to get a human
| to do voiceover work, check out fiverr.com and look for voice
| actors and narrators.
| ghaff wrote:
| Thanks for the insights.
|
| That doesn't really surprise me. On the flip side, I can get
| high quality transcriptions for $1/minute (given good audio
| quality).
|
| People, even those with better than average talent at some
| things, just often aren't that expensive. I suspect the same
| is true for some of the generative AI tasks that people are
| all excited about--new grad English majors are pretty cheap,
| especially if they can be assisted by search/generative AI.
| sigmar wrote:
| Fully agree with this. I could understand TTS for quickly
| converting articles to audio (and of course for visually
| impaired ppl), but for books the current state of this tech
| doesn't interest me. The qualities I want from a good narrator
| aren't in these samples (correct emphasis within a sentence,
| variable pacing dependent on context). For fiction books, good
| narrators will change timbre and accents depending on who is
| speaking in the text, not clear if they tried to achieve this
| at all (could have potential to use a different digital voice
| entirely).
|
| I hope that the results from this type of production are
| clearly labeled as computer generated in the store. I don't
| think putting "AB Apple Books" is clear or sufficient, for
| someone that doesn't know about this tech "AB" sort of looks
| like a placeholder for some unnamed human.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I tend to agree for the current product that Apple is
| releasing. IMO this technology starts to get interesting for
| books once folks can generate audiobooks for titles that do
| not have an audiobook (and likely never will due to publisher
| disinterest). When I first got into audiobooks I wanted to go
| back and listen to one of my favorite books and it wasn't
| available :/. I also see certain audiobooks described as
| "unlistenable" because of something the reader does.
| Hakeemmidan wrote:
| I regularly use my MacBook for narration. I look forward to this
| being better-adapted for books.
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| "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.
| abraxas wrote:
| Some narrators never should have had their jobs to begin with.
| I'm viscerally angry at the narrator of "Permutation City" on
| Audible. Such a great book that could not have a more bored,
| disinterested narrator who clearly doesn't understand the text
| he's narrating.
|
| An AI TTS engine at this level would do a far better job of it
| than that particular dude.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| This is as valid a criticism as complaining the phonograph will
| put musicians out if work. Time marches on, adapt.
| acdha wrote:
| I'm mixed on that because while I appreciate the craft of a
| professional narrator, I support a group of users who are
| mostly blind and there's a constant tradeoff between
| availability and the quality of an audio book. People value
| good recordings - people often have favorite narrators and will
| select books based on that, sometimes even outside their normal
| interests (which wasn't something I'd previously appreciated) -
| but if it's something you want to read, having it now versus a
| year from now matters.
| elil17 wrote:
| To be fair, a lot of narrators are really not doing that good
| of a job. I frequently hear audiobooks that have been rushed
| through production - mispronounced words, strange cadence, and
| overacting. I'll take what I heard in that demo over ACX crap
| any day.
|
| The current iteration of this technology is not competing with
| truly great narrators, like Tom Hanks or Jim Dale.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I doubt there are big issues for an AI to verbally mimic
| emotion. Placing emotion correctly in a long narration
| might be tricky if there are no indicators in the text, but
| I'm sure there will be a convenient self-service authoring
| tool where the Author/Publisher can adjust the emotion with
| a slider if he wants to finetune the result...
|
| > 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.
|
| A smaller market means higher cost per-unit, so higher
| prices per Audiobook. If the publisher needs to meet a
| specific price (i.e. to be listed on flat-fee audiobook-
| portals) he might be forced to produce digital narration as
| a default, which means the market for an additional
| "premium human narration" will have to prove itself first.
|
| I doubt that such a bar will be reached in most cases. It's
| more likely that people complaining about bad narration
| will put pressure on AI-engines to improve, but not form a
| market where a critical mass will pay additional 20$ for
| human narration...
| prepend wrote:
| Sad for the narrators, but good for the world.
|
| There are so many books I have that don't have an audiobook
| version because the economics just aren't there.
|
| This is an easy way that technology can expand human
| experience.
|
| Even in situations where the author reads the book, I expect it
| will be cheaper to train an AI to sound like the author than to
| put the author in a studio for 50 hours (or whatever).
|
| I thought it was a really dumb ruling when Amazon was forced to
| remove the text to speech function from kindle.
|
| I also think that screen readers are hobbled to avoid this
| legal issue. I want to send any text through a narrator bot and
| have it read it to me. There is zero need to compensate anyone
| other than the developer who writes the AI (and hopefully it
| will have open source versions donated by developers).
|
| If I've bought a book, I should be able to use it as I like.
| 33955985 wrote:
| Huh? The professionally narrated audiobooks don't get memory
| hole'd from the earth because Apple announced this service. The
| sentence you quoted is intended to emphasize that
| professionally narrated audiobooks will continue to be
| available on the platform.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Can they just train a model to narrate for themselves and
| change section that the model makes mistakes?
|
| TBH, human narrator on Audible sometimes just reads the stuff
| aloud
| SurgeArrest wrote:
| 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.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The pictures have weird limbs and the writing has errors. A
| book is long therefore there will be a lot of issues.
| lxgr wrote:
| Are visual generative models really that more advanced, or
| could this simply be an artifact of their usage?
|
| With generative visual art, people usually spend considerable
| time fine-tuning the results, and we don't get to see all the
| prompts that didn't work out (except if the failure is
| notable in some way).
|
| Try e.g. illustrating a book, but using only your first
| prompt for each image. I think the quality would be in the
| same ballpark as having Siri narrate the corresponding
| audiobook.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Because to understand intonation and rhythm you need to
| perfectly understand context and emotions. I don't doubt
| these things will be added soon enough, so I expect perfect
| reading end of this year and perfect reading in anyone's
| voice with a few samples in 2024.
| michaelmior wrote:
| > is it harder than generating beautiful pictures and
| sophisticated writings
|
| I think one differences with pictures and audio is that
| pictures are two-dimensional and we can't take in the whole
| image at a time. This makes it easy to overlook flaws without
| careful inspection. And I find that although there has been
| some amazing AI-generated art, there are still a lot of rough
| edges and tweaking required to get really clean images.
|
| As far as writing goes, I suspect that the rules of written
| language are easier to learn and violations easier to
| overlook than with generated audio.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Why is that we still can't have a perfect or near-perfect
| text-to-speech
|
| Define perfect ;) Two different people will read the same
| text slightly (or not slightly) differently.
|
| A great example is this brilliant and funny rendition of "To
| be or not to be" by Tim Minchin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Judy
| Dench, David Tennant and others. Sorry for the Facebook link,
| but it's very hard to find this video anywhere:
| https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=585252039999241
| romeros wrote:
| murf dot ai has near perfect tts. I think we had a major AI
| breakthrough in the last couple of years
| dagmx wrote:
| You're describing the effects of familiarity with a subject.
|
| Stable Diffusion / Midjourney etc look really pretty to the
| average person but on closer inspection they rarely hold up
| out of the box. If you're an experienced artist you pick up
| on all the flaws right away.
|
| ChatGPT and Copilot are similar. The answers seem confident ,
| but the more familiar you are with the domain of the answer,
| the quicker it becomes to see how flawed the results are.
|
| Now going back to TTS. You've spent your whole life knowing
| what speech sounds like. Unlike those other models that
| require an extra level of domain knowledge, everyone innately
| knows the sound of humans speaking. So you're effectively,
| and subconsciously, a domain expert.
|
| This is essentially the uncanny valley effect but for other
| areas.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Chat-GPT and StableDiffusion aren't perfect. They still
| produce weird responses or visual artifacts sometimes. But,
| it can be easy to move past these idiosyncrasies.
|
| I think the brain is just more sensitive to speech, because
| inflection and tone is a key part of communication. So even
| subtle artifacts in the generated voice are really obvious
| and annoying.
|
| Plus, as another commenter mentioned, books are long. An
| issue in 1 out of 10,000 words will be enough to break
| emersion.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't find it easy to look past their idiosyncrasies at
| all although they can produce impressive results with
| fiddling and luck.
|
| Listening to these samples, they're still robotic sounding
| to me just listening for 10 seconds. I can't imagine
| wanting to listen to a whole book like this given the
| option of listening to an even modestly-competent voice
| actor.
| potatolicious wrote:
| It's an extremely hard problem that lots of people are
| working on.
|
| The trick is that we have "pretty good" results for TTS as-
| is, but it has significant shortcomings that are more visible
| in certain use cases. The operative word is "prosody" - the
| cadence, rhythm, and pauses that are natural when speaking
| that are heavily dependent on context and content.
|
| Prosody is incredibly important to making natural utterances
| - TTS models that do not model prosody end up sounding very
| "flat", which is mostly all of the heavily used TTS engines
| out there right now. This is less glaring for short responses
| like what you would get from a voice assistant, but becomes a
| huge grating problem when you try to do long-form text
| reading.
|
| The trick with prosody is that it often requires information
| and context not contained in the text to be read. You would
| apply a different rhythm and stresses to a horror story than
| you would to a conference keynote speech, for example. It
| also requires a more sophisticated understanding of the
| _content_ of text rather than simply its constituent words,
| in order to figure out proper stresses and pauses.
|
| All of this is eminently solvable (as demonstrated here with
| the book voices) but is... rather difficult. I suspect we're
| not terribly close to a product where you can just feed it
| raw text (with annotating or otherwise providing additional
| data as context) and get a great result.
| davidzweig wrote:
| I wanted to make a human-like reading feature for our
| language-learning software. Training a model isn't too hard
| using something like https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS.
|
| The weak link was the available free/open datasets. You
| needed a single speaker with a pleasant voice, 20hrs+
| material from varied sources, recorded in a good recording
| enviroment with a good mic etc. For English, the go-to was
| LJSpeech, which doesn't fulfill all these requirements. I say
| 'was', as I haven't followed developments recently.
|
| Last year we decided to make our own dataset with a Irish
| woman, Jenny. She has a soft Irish lilt.
|
| Never got around around to training the model, but I will
| upload the raw audio and prompts here in a few hours (need to
| pay my internet bill in town..):
|
| https://github.com/dioco-group/jenny-tts-
| dataset/blob/main/R...
| WalterBright wrote:
| The first versions of Amazon's Kindle did this. Then they got
| mired in lawsuits over it from the book industry.
| hintymad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Can I plug a standard ebook in and get digital narration? Or just
| Apple Books?
| strictnein wrote:
| Neither. The author of the book has to utilize these.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rahoulb wrote:
| 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.
| Dig1t wrote:
| 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.
| mcphage wrote:
| > 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.
| TacWitch wrote:
| Mitchell sounds exactly like Ray Porter. I wonder if he trained a
| model with them or they did it without his direct approval
| jjcm wrote:
| 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...
|
| [1]
| https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/103iogu/_/j305eby/?conte...
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| I don't think you got the correct Ray Porter.
|
| Correct one is https://twitter.com/Ray__Porter
| Maursault wrote:
| > 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
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| Yea I immediately recognized him, hope he's getting paid for
| this.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| He likely won't be able to comment without breaching an NDA
| -- my recollection is that the guy who voiced the original
| SIRI got in all sorts of trouble for trying to capitalise on
| it.
| 33955985 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Voices have a race?
| vortegne wrote:
| Often there are clear voice and accent differences. Are you
| saying there aren't? That would be a very strange statement.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Accent depends on where you were born/raised, not on your
| race.
| 33955985 wrote:
| For the purposes of this discussion, this is a
| distinction without a difference. "Black voice" is a term
| of art, meant to convey that the voices in question were
| trained on features commonly associated with African
| American English. The voices in the example are US
| English voices.
|
| Race, ethnicity, accent, language -- all of these are
| complex topics with plenty of nuances. Short of writing a
| dissertation, no simple reply on a web forum will
| appropriately capture them. The good news is, we don't
| need to, since most Americans are familiar with African
| American English, whether they know the term itself or
| not, because African Americans have constituted a
| distinct culture in the US for all of the country's
| history.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| This answer might have ben reasonable if US was the only
| place on earth. When I hear Giannis Antetokoumpo speak
| english for example he sounds exactly like a
| Spanish/Greek person speaking English even though the
| native population of these places is white.
| 33955985 wrote:
| The US is Apple's primary market and the focus of this
| campaign.
| mhuffman wrote:
| 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/fi...
| vortegne wrote:
| 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.
| 33955985 wrote:
| Speakers of African American English have distinct timbre,
| rhythm, and cadences in their speech. There has long been a
| lack of these distinct features in TTS. Apple appears to have
| added a "Black voice" (though to be clear, there are speakers
| of African American English who are not Black) in 2021:
|
| https://www.consumerreports.org/digital-assistants/apples-
| ne...
| [deleted]
| tchalla wrote:
| Are you saying that voices across all races, cultures etc
| sound the same?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| No, it depends on the culture. Both whites and blacks
| raised on East London will have similar accents for
| example.
|
| Since we are strawmanning, are you saying that cultures and
| races have a 1-to-1 relationship?
| troupe wrote:
| I seriously doubt you can tell someone's genetics (their
| race) based on their voice. On the other hand, you can tell a
| huge amount about the culture in which they were raised.
| lvl102 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I cannot put into words how much I want Silmarillion read by
| Scarlett Johansson.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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")
| abudabi123 wrote:
| I want on Spotify early faery tales and parables of dragon-
| slayers and dragons as read aloud by Joe Rogan, Michael
| Bisping, Tom Aspinal to kids of the lower political-economy.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The quality needs to be very high for it not to be jarring. I
| stay with podcasts if the host has a "good radio voice". ("Not
| even all human voices are good enough for me.") It's just a
| very intimate medium to have someone's voice right in your
| head. If the voices have annoying quirks, those audiobooks will
| not be loved.
|
| Yes, it needs to be tens of hours of perfectly good narration.
| sidibe wrote:
| I have used TTS for books for years. It might be jarring the
| first time but you get used to it very quickly, I don't even
| think about it. I actually prefer it to my Audible books
| usually because it doesn't ever do anything to annoy me like
| some narrators, and I can understand it at whatever speeds.
| There are some dialogue heavy books where I have to read
| along though to be sure of who is talking.
| lvl102 wrote:
| I think you're underestimating state of the art in this area.
| You can do amazing things with just a few minutes of
| readings.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| No. You are vastly overestimating it. There is a reason
| there is no broadly available TTS service like there is for
| text-to-image. Anyone who says you can clone a voice in a
| few minutes is not talking about human-quality.
| lvl102 wrote:
| I've done a few models on my own. Stephen Fry is a
| relative easy one. This is from 2020 so I am sure state
| of the art is far better now.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm saying it likely does
| not sound good enough for the average person to listen to
| for a long time.
|
| Got a sample?
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| As an audible customer I can tell you clearly that I often
| buy audiobooks by a particular _narrator_ (discovering new
| authors) because the narrator is so good.
|
| I mean, Siri is quite good at reading texts (I imagine
| that's a huge training corpus) but I think we'll be in
| "uncanny valley" for quite a few years.
|
| It's possible that the public just gets used to that.
| TillE wrote:
| Same! I remember being really impressed by Justine Eyre
| in something, and then being a little disappointed to
| find that 99% of her work is romance novels.
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| If you're talking about using a trained voice actor, yes,
| they will cost an hourly rate to do this, which is
| reflective of the care and training they put into their
| craft. One should also expect that they don't simply press
| record, and then do an entire read through. They will go
| back and try different takes on segments
|
| If we're not talking about a trained voice actor, you may
| want to look at some thing like LibriVox, which is entirely
| volunteer run on public domain works, and while the efforts
| are appreciated, the quality is noticeably different.
| cianmm wrote:
| You need to take into account that nobody can perfectly
| read a book first time. I've done a reasonable amount of
| short-fiction narration for audio magazines, and even with
| many hours worth of script reading under my belt I still
| fumble every third or forth sentence. So I need to re-read
| those, and then I (or somebody else) needs to find those
| errors and edit them out, replacing with the fixed audio.
| Then people need to listen to the entire file at least once
| to ensure the whole thing makes sense and I didn't leave
| out a sentence somewhere or something.
|
| Audiobook narration is one of those things that is
| remarkably labour intensive, certainly much more than I'd
| have guessed before getting into it.
| vmilner wrote:
| This was demonstrated vividly when Andy Serkis read The
| Hobbit unabridged live for charity then did a separate
| recording as a commercial release. Both were great, but
| you could see how many minor flaws were in the live
| recording that would have had to be re-recorded in the
| commercial version. (I've no idea how long it took to
| record the Lord of the Rings which he did a year later)
| [deleted]
| nmfisher wrote:
| This is achievable with a very modest (say 50-100k) budget for
| voice actors and compute. Less if you're happier with lower
| quality. Speech synthesis is probably one of the few areas in
| ML that's trivially accessible to smaller orgs.
|
| Even Stable Diffusion was only 600k which is hardly outside the
| reach of a startup. The only ridiculously expensive models
| reserved for the big end of town are the GPT3 etc language
| models, and I fully expect the data/compute requirements to
| come down considerably in the near future.
| pmontra wrote:
| Not from the companies selling audiobooks IMHO.
|
| They will use this technology to save money on human speakers.
| If they release it into the public domain we'll end up with
| ebooks that can read themselves aloud and they'll lose part of
| the incomes from audio books.
|
| My Samsung phone can read ebooks with one of Samsung's voices
| right now, but it does an awful job at pauses. Basically, no
| commas. With a good voice I could turn each one of my ebooks in
| an audiobook.
| criddell wrote:
| > saddened at a future where all this is locked up in corporate
| hands
|
| I would guess this rolls out from big companies first because
| the first version is always the most difficult. It's only going
| to get easier to do and I would totally expect end-user
| controlled TTS systems to get better and eventually exceed the
| capabilities of this version from Apple. Of course Apple isn't
| going to sit still, so they will continue to improve as well.
|
| Are there examples from ten or twenty years ago of a technology
| that big companies had locked up that never made it out to end
| users? What we have might lag, but it seems like this stuff
| only ever gets easier to do.
| abraxas wrote:
| Linux is a prime example of a technology that was at first
| far behind its proprietary counterparts but eventually
| dominated and nearly extinguished all non-free competitors.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| For very specific uses. Linux is not a good options for
| general computers used by everyday people. That experience
| is still owned by large corporations.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| as AI requires larger and larger data sets and processing
| power (energy, money), how will public domain catch up to
| their wealth accumulation? it's not like linux where chipping
| away at functionality and incremental UX adds up sufficiently
| over time
| kaba0 wrote:
| There is https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en though I'm not sure
| where and how is it being used.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Common Voice is more about building a dataset or how people
| talk, especially with accents.
|
| While there is/was a voice synthesis project at Mozilla it
| was rudimentary like 3 years ago
| carb wrote:
| You can play with it on https://uberduck.ai/ and they have a
| very active Discord!
| idle_zealot wrote:
| What exactly is "Open Source" about uberduck? It looks like a
| proprietary tts saas to me; no links to a git repo and the
| "developer" section just shows how to get an API key and hit
| their service.
| enlyth wrote:
| This is already easily achievable on consumer hardware, you can
| train something like Tacotron 2 + WaveRNN on your own computer
| to achieve similar, if not better results. Check out this repo:
|
| https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
|
| You can also clone someone's voice by finetuning a pretrained
| LJSpeech model and training a vocoder from scratch, I've had
| great success with as little as 15 minutes of speech.
| GordonS wrote:
| > You can also clone someone's voice by finetuning a
| pretrained LJSpeech model and training a vocoder from
| scratch, I've had great success with as little as 15 minutes
| of speech.
|
| Are you able to point to any articles to help get started
| with this please?
| enlyth wrote:
| Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any beginner friendly
| tutorials.
|
| The way I learned it was just by experimenting with various
| GitHub repositories (e.g.
| https://github.com/fatchord/WaveRNN or the one I linked
| earlier) but it takes a lot of trial and error. Might do a
| writeup at some point if I have time.
| davidzweig wrote:
| Check my other comment in this thread, you might try our
| dataset. :)
| enlyth wrote:
| Will check it out, thanks
| rockemsockem wrote:
| It really isn't though. The level of fidelity that Apple is
| demonstrating in those samples is very impressive. You can
| generate fine voices with little work using repos like that
| one, but to get to the level Apple has takes a lot of work.
|
| EDIT: "fine voices" not "find voices"
| kumarvvr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Likely referring to Brandon Sanderson's recent comments[0].
|
| Edit: Previous discussion on HN: [1]
|
| [0] https://winteriscoming.net/2022/12/30/brandon-sanderson-
| blas...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34104204
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It would be great if these voices were Siri options. The new Siri
| choices are quite bad...
| csande17 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| float4 wrote:
| > 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 disagree for 2 reasons:
|
| 1. There's a perfectly fine reason to put a pause between
| "places" and "wild": to put emphasis on "wild". Bill doesn't
| see beauty in all places, but specifically in all _wild_
| places.
|
| 2. Interpreting the narration as "[...] all places. Wild!" is
| farfetched because the narrator pronounces "wild" very calmly
| and softly.
|
| I agree the pause is a bit too long, but I was expecting way
| worse when I read your comment about how "the AI completely
| faceplants".
| csande17 wrote:
| Maybe this is just me, but I find it really unnatural to
| pause in the middle of a short phrase like "all things wild".
| I'd emphasize "wild" by putting stress on it, not by pausing.
|
| But this excerpt is the end of a paragraph that begins with
| "Bill loved and found solace in nature." and describes taking
| walks and looking at the moon. This doesn't support
| emphasizing "wild" because the author has already established
| that information; the important part of the sentence is "deep
| spiritual yearning", or maybe "easiest to express", since the
| author then goes on to discuss how, after he died, Bill
| expressed himself from beyond the grave in other ways.
|
| I could kind of understand the AI not quite getting the
| emphasis right, since that's a judgement call that requires a
| lot of context from the rest of the book. But breaking up
| "all places wild" like the sample does suggests that it
| doesn't understand the basic grammar of the sentence.
| the_other wrote:
| I disagree with both reasons.
|
| 1. A long pause between "places" and "wild", to me, signals
| their dis-association, that "wild" does not link with
| "places". However, the lack of punctuation in the written
| text implies the phrase "all places wild", the "all wild
| places" you refer to. I'm with the GP here, the AI didn't
| convey the meaning I'd expect from the text.
|
| 2. Also, the preceding text seems to discuss a certain
| "ineffability", a spiritual/magic in the world that seems
| diffuse, broad and subtle. With that context, pronouncing
| "wild" calmly and softly ties it to the earlier ineffability
| rather than the more discrete "places". Again, this
| reinforces the "...places. Wild!" interpretation. I am very
| impressed the AI used two or more modes of expression (time,
| tone) to express a feeling... but I disagree that's what the
| text held.
|
| Maybe the AI's smarter than me.
| float4 wrote:
| > A long pause between "places" and "wild", to me, signals
| their dis-association, that "wild" does not link with
| "places"
|
| But that long pause is still way shorter than the pauses at
| _actual_ periods! Look at the waveform[0]: the ovals are
| the periods, the rectangle is the pause between "places"
| and "wild". I guess due to the length of the pauses at the
| actual periods, my brain automatically discards the
| possibility of "all places. Wild!" and then the best
| interpretation clearly is "all places wild" for me.
|
| But hey, the fact that at least two people interpreted it
| differently says something. Maybe this was more of a
| faceplant than I initially realized.
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/a/j9CtZFZ
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Empirical evidence of a pause and its length is not
| indicative of how the typical listener will interpret it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| twobitshifter wrote:
| By normal sentence construction it would be all wild places.
| It's a good test as you say, the author is having fun with
| grammar to give you the idea that it's a subset of places
| rather than "wild places", so I would expect it to be written
| with a link between places and wild, "all places-wild."
| csande17 wrote:
| I've seen this construction used in a lot of places (like the
| name of "All Things Digital", the predecessor to Re/code),
| but I have never heard of anyone putting a dash between the
| last two words.
| cprecioso wrote:
| 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
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| >But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care
| of how the AI reads it.
|
| Now human language, limited as it already is, is to be is to
| be humbled before machines that humans have also invented. In
| our inability to create a machine capable of doing
| cognitively what humans do, we prefer that humans function as
| if they had been lobotomized, in deference to our crude
| machines.
|
| We have built god, and god is stupid, and we bow before him
| because god has been created, once again, in the image of
| man.
| andrepd wrote:
| "Our algorithm isn't stupid, it's the literature which is
| wrong" is not something I expected to read today.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| Have you ever read a written passage out loud and failed
| because the text was too contrived and the nature of the
| intonation only became apparent after re-reading the
| sentence multiple times?
|
| I have, plenty of times. And in most of those times I got
| really angry at the author for writing "wrong".
|
| So yes, to me saying that the literature is wrong is
| nothing unexpected.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| I can understand that sentence fine, I don't see anything
| wrong with it.
| dbspin wrote:
| Writer here, it's a terrible sentence.
|
| "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."
|
| "Deep currents of spiritual yearning" is both cliched and
| unspecific / unclear.
|
| "That" is superfluous.
|
| It's unclear how Bill is expressing the beauty he sees, and
| the sentence structure implies he's somehow responsible for
| the natural beauty.
|
| "All places wild" is wilfully awkward and anachronistic.
|
| There are countless better ways to say the same thing. For
| example the tone would be similar and the sentence more
| concise just to say:
|
| 'When Bill spoke of the beauty of nature, I could sense it
| inspired spiritual feelings in him.'
|
| Or simply: Natural beauty inspired in Bill a yearning for
| connection to something spiritual.
|
| Neither are great - because the central thought is unclear.
| Writing is to a large extent the process of expressing a
| thought or feeling. Clarifying exactly what one wants to
| say is a central part of writing and editing. The author
| seems to have failed to clearly define their idea or
| emotion, so its expression is decorated rather than
| clarified however you phrase it.
| jtbayly wrote:
| It doesn't matter if the sentence is terrible writing. It
| can still be easily read out loud correctly, but not by
| this computer program.
| botro wrote:
| Could you do Hemingway, McCarthy and Joyce next? It's
| untenable they wrote 'unspecific / unclear / superfluous
| / awkward / anachronistic' language such that our robots
| cannot render to speech.
| defen wrote:
| They write literary fiction, though. The selected passage
| is listed under "Nonfiction/Self-development"
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| "The Distant Shore: Stories of Love and Faith in the
| Afterlife"
|
| It's a book of stories about her dead husband. Non-
| fiction, yes, but it's not exactly "How to Lose 10 Pounds
| in 10 Days".
| [deleted]
| trynewideas wrote:
| Context for the sentence: https://books.google.com/books?
| id=-v4GEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT20&lpg=P...
|
| > Linda Hale Bucklin made a pact with her husband, Bill,
| to communicate after death. Here she shares her personal
| experience and other stories of love and faith in the
| afterlife.
|
| Bill died after 40 years of marriage.
|
| The rest of the paragraph:
|
| > Bill loved and found solace in nature. Often, we voiced
| our wonder of the sight of a full moon peeking above the
| hills of Stinson, rising heavily until it pushed free of
| the horizon, a perfect circle in the dark sky. On nights
| with a new moon, we would walk to the end of the beach to
| find our favorite constellation, the Pleiades. 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| Mind if I ask where you're from? While not really adding
| anything or altering the meaning (so technically it could
| be called superfluous), removing it here to my British
| brain makes the sentence sound lazy and I was definitely
| taught in school that it should be there. I do also agree
| that the sentence is terribly written in general though.
| dbspin wrote:
| Sure. I'm Irish. I've been a professional writer for
| about thirteen years. Formality of sentence construction
| is context dependent. In prose there's usually little
| purpose and no solid grammatical rule for retaining
| superfluous words. Depending on the pace and rhythm of
| the piece - which in turn dictate interesting things like
| the readers perception of time. For example you can make
| time flow faster by using brief, truncated, staccato
| sentences. Or stretch it out with more formal,
| grandiloquent sentences. You can also convey the
| informality of a relationship, or even the physical
| structure of space or an object in much the same way.
| These are elements of voice - the character or tone of
| the sentence or paragraph, which is contextualised by the
| overall piece. I'm not articulating theory here - more
| trying to convey how I and other writers intuitively
| learn to play with prose.
| drcongo wrote:
| Fantastic answer, thank you. Thinking about it, it's
| literally decades since I last wrote creative prose,
| maybe my formal writing muscle memory was just kicking in
| here.
| smugma wrote:
| > Writing is to a large extent the process of expressing
| a thought or feeling.
|
| Agree.
|
| > Clarifying exactly what one wants to say is a central
| part of writing and editing.
|
| In professional/technical writing, sure? Authors have
| been known to have different writing styles, and the
| style may be ambiguous or convoluted to intensify the
| thoughts or feelings the writer is trying to convey.
|
| PS everyone posting here is a "writer"
| splatzone wrote:
| You might be right with some of these criticisms about
| the ideas and style of the sentence, although I think
| most of these come down to taste and context.
|
| Grammatically, the sentence is easy to parse and a native
| English reader would understand how to say it out load.
| RobinL wrote:
| Native English speaker here: I flubbed the first time I
| read it - specifically the 'all places wild' bit at the
| end.
| [deleted]
| gbourne wrote:
| > "That" is superfluous.
|
| I always use the trick when I write of reading the
| sentence without the "that"...still makes sense then you
| don't need "that". Mostly.
| [deleted]
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Reader here, it's a perfectly fine sentence.
| bwanab wrote:
| I also thought it was a bad sentence, but thank you for
| giving me solid reasons why that is so.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't find anything terrible about it. I'd probably
| break it into two sentences but that's mostly down to my
| style.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Thanks for this. Can you do Go Dog Go next?
| bottled_poe wrote:
| > Writing is to a large extent the process of expressing
| a thought or feeling
|
| Neither of which we believe a machine to be capable of
| conceiving.
| leokennis wrote:
| To me this feels like the automated video slideshows that
| Apple Photos (and undoubtedly Google Photos) makes for you.
| Perfectly fine, but indeed even on a casual watch you notice
| mistakes/imperfections you'd never make if you were producing
| such slideshow manually.
|
| But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video
| editing for something you casually consume?
|
| I think almost any audiobook listener will vastly prefer a
| serviceable but imperfect audiobook when compared with no
| audiobook at all.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| I find those slideshows unintentionally hilarious - ten
| photos of my kid interspersed with a flash photo of the
| back of the washing machine and some cable that's hanging
| down underneath my car, an accidental screen grab of a text
| message, all treated with the same importance and jaunty
| library soundtrack.
| smugma wrote:
| This made me LOL, as I've had this happen many times. But
| much less so in the past 2 years, around the time iOS
| Photos started integrating with Apple Music.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Agreed. I bought an old Kindle for traveling because I
| could use its TTS to listen to ebooks. Now that's a common
| feature of most reader apps, yet at the time it was rare
| and even newer Kindles had dropped TTS.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of
| video editing for something you casually consume?
|
| Any book of any length took countless hours to write and
| edit. Yes, I think it's worth a bit of extra time for a
| human to go through and read the thing aloud.
|
| If the alternative really is no audiobook at all... okay, I
| guess something is better than nothing. But on the whole,
| I'd like publishers to just record more audiobooks, and I'm
| concerned this technology will result in fewer "real"
| audiobooks being produced.
| raverbashing wrote:
| And might I add, Helena does not sound like a Soprano given the
| speech tone. (Also, smoking is bad mmmmkay)
| jkmcf wrote:
| A number of books I've been reading aloud leave out the comma
| after a prepositional phrase (and friends), and it totally
| throws off my cadence.
| adolph wrote:
| Perhaps this bug could be a feature? A panda
| walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a
| gun and fires two shots in the air. "Why?" asks the
| confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda
| produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over
| his shoulder. "I'm a panda," he says at the door.
| "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry
| in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
| "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to
| China. Eats, shoots & leaves."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves
| alanwreath wrote:
| 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_.
| layer8 wrote:
| This should be a feature available for any text document. The
| existing iOS text-to-speech is almost barely adequate, but not
| really.
| cjensen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Elof wrote:
| I use the iOS Speech Accessibility feature to listen to ebooks
| and it works great.
| alanwreath wrote:
| that is a good feature, it just seemed like the reading I'm
| hearing off of the samples for these audiobooks is a tad less
| robotic.
| flakiness wrote:
| 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!
| drexlspivey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| phphphphp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| habosa wrote:
| 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?
| southp4w wrote:
| The Mitchell voice also sounds almost exactly like Ray Porter,
| another real audiobook narrator.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| If she did she'll likely be NDA'd up to her neck to prevent her
| ever admitting it publicly.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Can it pronounce "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
| Buffalo buffalo" ?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buff...
| mongol wrote:
| What accent is used by the first voice? It creeps me slightly,
| some kind of rz sounds...
| jensensbutton wrote:
| 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.
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