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Apple Books digital narration

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Re: Apple Books digital narration

#11

Post by rickdeckard »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #6

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 j…

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).

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#12

Post by csande17 »

m_eiman wrote: post #10
csande17 wrote: post #8

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 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.

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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#13

Post by cprecioso »

csande17 wrote: post #8

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 pau…

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

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#14

Post by carlob »

theshrike79 wrote: post #2

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.

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...

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#15

Post by shrx »

theshrike79 wrote: post #2

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.

> It was killed by publishers who wanted to charge separately for audiobooks.

Any sources on this?

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#17

Post by rickdeckard »

lvl102 wrote: post #5

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.

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...

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#18

Post by rickdeckard »

BuckyBeaver wrote: post #16

"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.

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...

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#19

Post by [deleted] »

shrx wrote: post #15
theshrike79 wrote: post #2

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.

> It was killed by publishers who wanted to charge separately for audiobooks. Any sources on this?

[deleted]

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#20

Post by bentley »

shrx wrote: post #15
theshrike79 wrote: post #2

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.

> It was killed by publishers who wanted to charge separately for audiobooks. Any sources on this?

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...

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