Apple Books digital narration
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Apple Books digital narration
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Re: Apple Books digital narration
#2The 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.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#3Good 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/.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#4The 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.
licensing as in?
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#5I 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.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#6Will 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.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#7The 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.
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...
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#8The "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.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#9I 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.
I cannot put into words how much I want Silmarillion read by Scarlett Johansson.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#10The "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 pau…
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.