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Apple Books digital narration

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Re: Apple Books digital narration

#61

Post by criddell »

carlob wrote: post #14
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...

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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#62

Post by jagged-chisel »

float4 wrote: post #44
the_other wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "in…

> 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…

Empirical evidence of a pause and its length is not indicative of how the typical listener will interpret it.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#63

Post by andy_ppp »

"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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#64

Post by criddell »

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…

> 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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#65

Post by gbourne »

dbspin wrote: post #52
ClassyJacket wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 natura…

> "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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#66

Post by phphphphp »

phphphphp wrote: post #59
jdmoreira wrote: post #53

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

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 s…

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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#67

Post by aeneasmackenzie »

nstart wrote: post #27

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 arou…

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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#68

Post by qwerty456127 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #63

"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.…

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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#69

Post by abraxas »

criddell wrote: post #64
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…

> 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…

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.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#70

Post by hnbad »

londons_explore wrote: post #60
dmitriid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 Vo…

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.

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