[HN Gopher] The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
___________________________________________________________________
The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
Author : isbn
Score : 283 points
Date : 2023-09-11 12:06 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net)
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| roguesupport wrote:
| [dead]
| sequoia wrote:
| 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. [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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet another example on how jobs will go away, goodbye voice
| actors.
| eole666 wrote:
| For now, actual voice actors make audiobooks listening way more
| enjoyable. Those AI voices are convincing but lack the soul,
| emotions and art direction of actual voice acting. Think about
| listening to a book for 8 hours with a monotonous AI voice
| reading it...
| [deleted]
| cush wrote:
| It's all voice and no acting
| crop_rotation wrote:
| True, and sadly they will go too quickly for voice actors to
| have any time to adapt.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| Check out audio fiction podcasts. Some do full productions of
| short stories. Depending on the work, reading the text is a
| compromise over listening to the reading. For instance, music
| is extremely important to these two stories by Aliya
| Whiteley:
|
| https://www.drabblecast.org/2007/12/20/drabblecast-43-jelly-.
| ..
|
| Warning: the above has mild language and adult themes.
|
| https://www.drabblecast.org/2010/07/27/drabblecast-173-go-
| be...
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| atrus wrote:
| You'll never pay/listen to anything you're able to identify
| as AI-generated.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| prepend wrote:
| It's not for you, it's for the millions/billions not
| currently listening to audiobooks.
|
| This reminds me of the "I'll never listen to mp3, I love my
| <whatever>." The goal wasn't to convince existing people but
| to expand to new people.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Seems like reasonable backfill for the countless books that
| will never get audio treatment.
| Borrible wrote:
| 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.
| dirtyid wrote:
| 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.
| jawns wrote:
| 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.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > hiccups in the source material
|
| From Joyce's _Ulysses_ (capitalization possibly wrong):
| "nes. yo."
|
| Good luck with that!
| Borrible wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| So, will your books be available with an audio section as a
| free encore in the future? :)
| hedora wrote:
| 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/
|
| Other sites to check out (all are donation-supported and pay
| authors):
|
| https://www.drabblecast.org/
|
| https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/podcasting/
|
| 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...
|
| I could have picked literally 100's of other stories; this one
| wins due to recency bias and the authors cyberpunk roots.
| jmspring wrote:
| For horror short stories - I'm a fan of the "Horrorbabble"
| podcast -
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=horrorb...
| _the_inflator wrote:
| 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
|
| Enjoy the ROFLcopter. ;)
| rhyme-boss wrote:
| 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.
| chthonicdaemon wrote:
| Do you have the same objection to reading transcripts?
| rhyme-boss wrote:
| Transcripts of what? I think stories are special, and I
| wouldn't lump them together with "all text".
| brudgers wrote:
| 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.
| tmountain wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| nazcan wrote:
| The key is just which time is faster. If you are able to
| just listen to it once, and note a few errors, and
| slightly adjust, it may still may be much faster to use
| AI.
| hedora wrote:
| The economics are only lopsided if the cost of producing
| the audio version is significant compared to the cost of
| writing the work of fiction.
| dirtyid wrote:
| >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.
|
| AI TTS still uncanny valley enough to distract. I prefer even
| more soulless traditional TTS which sounds "neutral" after
| habituation. To the point where my brain can start layering on
| characterization as if I was reading. AI TTS feels like
| listening to to medicore voice actor, where it's hard to
| overwrite their creative choices, so just left disapointmented
| and annoyed.
| j3d wrote:
| 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.
| It's a desktop app (built with Tauri) that scans your audiobook
| folder and lets you sort, search and tag your audiobooks.
| nineplay wrote:
| 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.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| 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.
| cush wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-aud...
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I'm curious about the sub-domain
| _https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net_. Are these
| auto-generated? I 'm guessing these style of subdomains are not
| named by a human.
| freeplay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| this is likely Mark Hamilton's static site deployed from his
| own blob storage account https://github.com/mhamilton723
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Oh man they have obscure Plato! I can't even spend money to get
| all of plato read.
| sb057 wrote:
| 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...
| xrd wrote:
| 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.
| barrenko wrote:
| We're living through the Great Enshitification.
| fuzztester wrote:
| And it is living through us, or on us.
| janekm wrote:
| Elevenlabs is a lot closer to compelling audiobook narration
| (needs a better way to deal with multiple characters in a story
| without manual use of multiple voices):
| https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLa...
| (an H.G.Wells example I just asked it to read).
| tkgally wrote:
| I was going to mention ElevenLabs, too. Their samples are
| very impressive in how the intonation and word stress are
| varied based on the text's meaning. Their pricing is a bit
| high for personal use, though.
|
| (The link you posted seems to have been truncated. Can you
| try posting it again?)
| janekm wrote:
| Yeah, sadly it'd cost about $100 to get a book per month...
| Not quite competitive with Audible yet, but give it a year
| perhaps, or a few iterations of the open source models...
| (fixed the link)
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| 100 dollars per book, right, but that book is public and
| can be shared between millions of people.
| MKTSPCLST wrote:
| [dead]
| petemir wrote:
| ftfy
|
| https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLa.
| ..
| janekm wrote:
| thanks!
| ecshafer wrote:
| > Like Louis CK said: "Everything is amazing and no one is
| happy."
|
| Everything is not amazing. Sure things are amazing from a
| _technical_ perspective. But most tech advancements I think
| have been harmful to society in the last 30 years or so. Its
| awesome that computers are so powerful and we have awesome
| video and photos and can share things so easily. But technology
| should better lives, and not cheapen it, which it often does.
| Tech is being used to try and replace essential human lived
| experiences to try and inject advertising into it and extract
| money.
|
| Technology can not replace the human, its impossible. No matter
| how good the AI is at reading the book, it will never replace
| sitting next to your parent and them reading it. No matter how
| easy it is to share a video or a photo, it will never replace
| sitting next to someone and them showing you photos, or better
| yet being there when the photo was taken.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > it will never replace sitting next to someone and them
| showing you photos
|
| It definitely does replace that. It sucks so much to be
| trapped next to someone showing you their photo album or
| vacation slides, when you don't really care, that this became
| a stock scene in 20th-century comedy TV series and films.
| Nowadays when people are sharing their photos online, that
| gives their peers the choice of whether to look or whether to
| ignore, and that is immensely freeing.
| ecshafer wrote:
| The photo slide show of someone's vacation was a stock
| scene in comedies. But have you never sat down with family
| and went through old photos? Having conversations about
| where was that? who was this? who was this as a baby? Its a
| very different and much more personal experience than
| flipping through facebook.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| He cherry-picked one of the three examples in your post
| and attacked it. He won't choose the other two because he
| has no argument for them. Ignore.
| c0pium wrote:
| Sure have, it's hellacious. I don't give a fuck about who
| that baby was, why would I? Relations who my parents only
| vaguely remember going somewhere boring that I would
| never go, or someone's 12th trip to the same lake, is a
| great use for Facebook. Most people are crazy boring, if
| I care I can always ask.
| mathgeek wrote:
| You're talking about _being shown_ photos you don't care
| about, while GP is talking about showing your own photos to
| someone. I agree with the example you're discussing,
| though.
| c0pium wrote:
| Ah, you're talking about main character syndrome. Showing
| pictures to someone is one of the cruelest things you can
| do; you're probably boring and a terrible storyteller
| (most people are) but they're going to feel obligated to
| not tell you that.
|
| It's always amazing to me that people almost universally
| hate other people's slideshows, and then don't have the
| self awareness to realize that they do the exact same
| thing.
| jzb wrote:
| I forget the exact quote but the thing I've seen making the
| rounds sums it up pretty well: Computers were supposed to do
| the work so people could make art and write poetry. Now the
| computers are making art and writing poetry and I still have
| to have a job.
|
| In another life I'd love to do voice over work. (I even have
| a face for radio!) But, instead, technology is being used to
| avoid even having humans do that type of work. Sure, today
| it's PG, but they're definitely doing this with an eye to
| replacing actual voiceover actors.
|
| Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and save
| money?" and not "how can people have better lives and work
| less?" And it's going to continue until it's "what the fuck
| do we do with all these jobless people who've been replaced?"
| m463 wrote:
| > Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and
| save money?"
|
| I think what happens is that the repeat jobs are automated,
| and the (remaining) people get the hard corner cases.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I think the thing that has surprised everyone in this
| revolution is that the opposite has happened. Musk wasted
| billions trying to automate vehicle manufacturing while
| AI is threatening to take the jobs of novelists and
| graphic designers.
| cxr wrote:
| As software developers, we know what getting workers to
| have better lives while working less looks like. There's
| some sleight of hand at play, though, in the
| employer/employee relationship (favoring the employer).
|
| > Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and
| save money?" and not "how can people have better lives and
| work less?"
|
| It's not just AI, but technology generally. And it's
| because when it comes to managing people, organizations for
| the most part don't actually concern themselves with
| getting their employees to produce value--that is, whether
| they are, and how much, and at what cost (to the business)
| it comes at, and where that measure of productivity lies
| (objectively) when scored against some rubric. Instead what
| they make their most immediate concern is whether their
| employees are exposed to sufficient toil. Look at any
| example that involves someone accepting a new job with a
| set of work duties/expectations where they proceed to
| automate part of their workload and thus provide the same
| value (or more) in comparison to what they were doing
| before, or in comparison to their coworkers, or in
| comparison to whomever would have ended up with the job if
| the person who did accept and automate it had accepted an
| offer elsewhere instead: they end up soliciting feedback
| (or opining themselves) about whether what they're doing is
| unethical.
|
| This is _the_ mechanism that wealth disparity through
| concentration of wealth comes from, but everyone (the
| employer and the employee alike) walks around as if they
| either don 't notice it or--if they do--as if it's wrong
| when there's a known path for the concentration to flow
| upward but it isn't happening.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| It will probably all fall apart when there is no one left
| to purchase this stuff, no job, no money, no purchasing
| power.
|
| Once purchasing power has evaporated, then and only then
| will the system change.
|
| Alternatively AI will also replace the jobless.
| civilitty wrote:
| We'll invent a third World War long before that happens -
| to thin the herd and remind everyone using rationing and
| austerity about how great consumerism is, while creating
| plenty of jobs rebuilding the industrialized world.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I wouldn't blame folks wanting to work on fast takeoff AI
| with no human alignment concerns. Heads, the world ends
| because you've bootstrapped something unsympathetic and
| more powerful than humanity. Tails, you've bootstrapped
| something that might be able to overpower entrenched
| interests, providing a chance at a better societal
| outcome.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and
| save money?"
|
| this is not true now, and also does not have to be true.
| Instead of a "look at the incentives" talk to someone
| having a bad comment moment.. instead we can be reminded of
| Doug Englebart, who said "computer systems can augment
| human intelligence and team interaction" and specifically
| NOT "replace humans" .. As I understand it, in Palo Alto,
| Doug found great interest among the DoD crowd .. a good
| portion of whom would have a second meeting after his
| demos, and then discuss how they can get back to the
| important work of replacing people.
|
| Consider the incentives, consider _who_ has an interest in
| this hype cycle, and sales profits. When you see a US visit
| to Vietnam this week, with MSFT pitching "social trust" AI
| services to "ordinary people" .. does this really sound
| like trust in the making? Is AI drones in combat really
| what we _need_ now ? Replacing striking Hollywood writers
| and getting name-brand actors for pennies on the dollar, is
| that what "we" need?
|
| I do not agree that AI can only replace people.. however,
| there is a lot of short term profit and control ready for
| those that do.. maybe something needs to be done about
| that?
| karmelapple wrote:
| I'd suggest reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell [1]. I
| think it addresses some of the concerns you have.
|
| 1. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42771901
| prepend wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| philomath_mn wrote:
| > Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever
| book you want (like Spotify)
|
| Not true at all. Audible Plus gives you access to a tiny
| subset of the full library, the rest (which includes all
| the best titles) need to be purchased separately.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Unless things have changed since I was a subscriber, you
| get a token every month which can be used to purchase any
| book from the full library. So its effectively 1 book a
| month + a few extras bonuses for $7.95
| izzydata wrote:
| You don't get a token without paying for the premium plan
| at $15 a month. Also, don't tell anyone but if you
| subscribe and then cancel and give the reason that it is
| too expensive you can often get a reduced price the next
| few months.
| prepend wrote:
| Audible is $15/month and you get to choose one title.
|
| I think you're confusing audible today with audible of 20
| years ago.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| I typically buy at least two titles per month, and the
| best deal ended up being:
|
| Audible Premium Plus - 1 Credit Every Other Month for $17
| ($8.50/mo)
|
| You can buy 3 more credits for $37.99 (12.66/ea). It's
| also worth checking individual titles because quite a few
| cost less than the credits.
|
| Correction: I guess I actually buy slightly fewer than
| 2/mo because there's a plan for that ($22.95/mo) that's
| cheaper than the 27.50/mo from my numbers above. I had
| that one for a while but ended up feeling pressured to
| use them before they expire.
| swores wrote:
| You probably won't be interested since it's even more
| pressure to use them before they expire, but there's also
| annual plans which are even cheaper if you can be happy
| using 12 (or 24) tokens within 12 months (you get them at
| the start and they expire at the end of the year):
|
| Audible Premium Plus Annual - 12 Credits $149.50/year
| (way cheaper in UK: PS69.99/year)
|
| Audible Premium Plus Annual - 24 Credits $229.50/year
| (PS109.99/year)
|
| US: https://www.audible.com/ep/memberbenefits UK:
| https://help.audible.co.uk/s/article/what-are-the-
| different-...
|
| Although, as soon as I'm logged in with my account (UK)
| which had subscribed in the past but isn't currently, it
| doesn't seem to be giving me any options except to start
| a 1 month free trial for 1 token/month, not sure if other
| options aren't available or just extremely well hidden...
|
| edit: no it is available for my account, though I'm going
| to remain a non-subscriber and keep using my local
| digital library :)
| servercobra wrote:
| 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.
| gnutrino wrote:
| Seth Godin did a whole Akimbo podcast that was written by
| ChatGPT, and the audio was AI generated. The voice was spot on,
| the content and delivery was dead. I almost fell asleep
| listening to it, which is NEVER the case for any other episode
| of Akimbo I've listened to.
| Pxtl wrote:
| > H.G. Wells was read with a pause in between each period
| because it "thinks" that each letter boundary is a sentence
| change
|
| This is why I'm a firm "two spaces after the period" guy. Makes
| it unambiguous the difference between the abbrevs. period and
| the sentence-end period. Otherwise you get sentences like
| "Let's not forget that Dr. Principal does not care about this."
| which can be read in two valid ways.
| jtbayly wrote:
| How does it feel to have websites and books and newspapers
| and practically every other place silently ignore your double
| spaces and treat them as a single space?
| [deleted]
| ta988 wrote:
| Sidenote, I asked ChatGPT about where to put the comma and
| how it would change the meaning of the sentence. It got it
| right.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Fair point, the sentence I invented off the top of my head
| isn't perfectly grammatically correct but it's close-enough
| that it shows the ambiguity problem. It's a lot to ask
| text-to-speech and typesetting programs to figure out
| contextually which periods are abbreviations and which
| periods are end-of-sentence, and so having a hard text cue
| like double-space would help. Then typesetters would have a
| hard cue of when to replace the space with a thin-space
| (which is supposed to happen in the case of something like
| "H. G. Wells").
| bloak wrote:
| Of course some style guides would tell you not to put a dot
| after "Dr" because "r" is the last letter of "Doctor".
| Similarly, the abbreviation of "Saint" would be "St", while
| the abbreviation of "Street" would be "St.", according to
| those style guides.
|
| Meanwhile the GB military style guide says never to use a dot
| after any abbreviation, I think.
|
| Also, the style guides I'm familiar with prescribe "H. G.
| Wells", rather than "H.G. Wells", but "H.G.W." if you're
| abbreviating all of the words.
|
| None of this is of much interest to anyone who isn't an
| editor but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
| Pxtl wrote:
| > "H. G. Wells",
|
| Right. That's probably the most common historical form, and
| is a good example of how the punctuation for sentence-ends
| and abbreviations is often the same - period and then
| single-space.
| cxr wrote:
| This trick doesn't work across linebreaks (unless you adopt a
| rule like "treat the spaces in the nouns as non-breaking and
| do not permit a linebreak for anything that isn't a sentence
| boundary").
| bloak wrote:
| Emacs does (or did) exactly that, perhaps by default: I
| think I had to disable it once because it was annoying me
| ... (setq sentence-end-double-space nil)?
| cxr wrote:
| Not the same thing.
| jcon321 wrote:
| 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/ (Braille material too!)
| [deleted]
| i_am_a_squirrel wrote:
| 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]
| davidzweig wrote:
| Oh, snap, we've been working on importing Gutenburg to LR:
|
| 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.
| letmevoteplease wrote:
| Just for fun, here's what happens to Pride and Prejudice:
|
| User: Rewrite and simplify the following text for a modern
| audience: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a
| single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a
| wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man
| may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so
| well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is
| considered as the rightful property of some one or other of
| their daughters."
|
| ChatGPT: "People generally believe that a rich single guy must
| be looking for a wife. Even if we don't really know what he's
| thinking when he moves to a new area, everyone assumes he's up
| for grabs by one of the local girls."
| hedora wrote:
| Standard Ebooks has the ability to filter books by reading
| level.
|
| That seems much better for people trying to learn English.
|
| https://standardebooks.org/
|
| They carefully curate and copy-edit their books, and go for
| quality over quantity. I think that is probably the right
| choice. We already have free access to an effectively infinite
| amount of mediocre content on the internet.
| floren wrote:
| It's amazing that a decade ago I'd have called you an
| exceptionally demented individual for doing this, but these
| days there's so much stupid unconscionable shit going on with
| AI that it hardly stands out.
| e12e wrote:
| 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...
| [deleted]
| aedocw wrote:
| 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
| kwerk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It does not handle that. A PR to replace stuff like that
| would be fantastic, I'd love it - please do!
| [deleted]
| artyn wrote:
| So many works are labeled [] or nan.
| iandanforth wrote:
| 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.
| The_suffocated wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| I noticed the same, especially when some kind of structure text
| (like a bullet point or numbered list) comes in.
| 8s2ngy wrote:
| 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.
| yread wrote:
| Very cool. Although they shouldn't have even bothered with the
| poems, it sounds terrible
|
| https://archive.org/download/synapseml_gutenberg_a_bell_s_bi...
| saw-lau wrote:
| I thought I'd look up something I knew and spotted 'Therese
| Raquin', which gets butchered into 'Rackwin'... some way to go
| yet, I think!
|
| https://ia804709.us.archive.org/35/items/synapseml_gutenberg...
|
| (Hats off for the effort, though.)
| didntcheck wrote:
| See also: Librivox [1], for public-domain audio books read by
| actual humans
|
| [1] https://librivox.org/
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Lit2Go is also good: 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| 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-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-
| sin...
| DanielleMolloy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks, I'm happy this exists. I think I'll start contributing
| this fall.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I cannot listen to audiobooks read by text to speech they sound
| awful.
|
| Only human narrators are acceptable.
| tbalsam wrote:
| https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1
| hackernj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I applaud the effort, but the voices are too distracting for me
| to focus for more than a minute.
| olav wrote:
| The site is curiously broken in Safari browser.
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