Apple Books digital narration • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#21

Post by ClassyJacket » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:35 AM UTC

cprecioso wrote: post #13

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 A…

I can understand that sentence fine, I don't see anything wrong with it.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#22

Post by abudabi123 » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:36 AM UTC

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.

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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#23

Post by amelius » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:40 AM UTC

rickdeckard wrote: post #18

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 s…

> 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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#24

Post by karmasimida » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:47 AM UTC

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.

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

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#25

Post by karmasimida » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:50 AM UTC

rickdeckard wrote: post #17

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 di…

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

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#26

Post by float4 » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:56 AM UTC

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…

> 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".

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#27

Post by nstart » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:59 AM UTC

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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#28

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:03 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#29

Post by nmfisher » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:03 AM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#30

Post by the_other » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:09 AM UTC

float4 wrote: post #26

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…

> 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 speci…

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.