I hope Amazon does this too but probably they won't because it'll cannibalize Audible. This is good move from Apple. Take the credit!
Apple Books digital narration
101–110 of 244 posts
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Voices have a race?
Often there are clear voice and accent differences. Are you saying there aren't? That would be a very strange statement.
Not so strange! ... at least when it comes to the legal community[1] (pdf).
For those around during the O.J. Simpson trial, this was a very, very contentious topic during the trial!
[1]https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl.edu/dist/3/2151/fi...
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#103While TTS has broad application, I am skeptical about Apple’s process being able to compete with the best narrators.
I have my biases. My wife and I have licenses to listen to about 500 Audible audio books and in the best of them I feel like I have a human to human relationship with the narrator that is similar to a relationship with the author.
I have mostly worked on deep learning projects over the last eight years, so I appreciate the tech as an engineering tool, but I think it is important to view tech as a servant to human experience.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#104Earlier 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…
It’s not big enough to to tell the major publishers that. Especially if it wants mainstream titles on its relatively small ebook platform.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#105I'm skeptical given the state of the art.
There is way more good audio content out there than I have the time/interest to listen too and I can't believe I'm that atypical. And a book is a relatively big listening time commitment. I'll happily pay a few dollars more for a good human narrator.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
True, but I expect the critical mass of the target group will remain to be people frequently listening to Audiobooks --> Those people are more-likely subscribed to an Audiobook service --> are not paying a per-audiobook price but a flat-fee --> The flat-fee for the whole catalog is lower than buying one audiobook.
I would expect this target-group to access a mix of human and digitally narrated books during the transition to digital narration, with best-selling books still being narrated by humans. Users may then complain about the quality of the digital narration, but will keep using such services as the price-expectation is now set.
--> A competition for better digital narration engines will likely drive evolution of the engine and authoring tools, further increasing the pressure of publishers to justify the bottom-line of per-book Audiobook production costs.
> Cherry-picking is easy, but I paid for this, it needs to be human quality throughout
That's a really interesting aspect. If the Audiobook delivers the content with a human voice but still not engaging enough, how many listeners would put the blame on the narration rather than the book itself... ("I like this new song of Metallica, but I don't like how they sing it")
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#107I regularly use my MacBook for narration. I look forward to this being better-adapted for books.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#108"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.
murf dot ai has near perfect tts. I think we had a major AI breakthrough in the last couple of years
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Often there are clear voice and accent differences. Are you saying there aren't? That would be a very strange statement.
Not so strange! ... at least when it comes to the legal community[1] (pdf). For those around during the O.J. Simpson trial, this was a very, very contentious topic during the trial! [1] https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl.edu/dist/3/2151/fi...
I see your point. And of course it's not a 100% accurate thing, but you know what I mean. Being admissible in court as evidence and furthering representation of a group are two completely different things.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#110Earlier 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…
> 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.".
You assume that it is authors who sell books on Apple platform (or on any platform).
Let me introduce you to a couple of chunky boys:
- Penguin Random House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Random_House
- HarperCollins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarperCollins
- Simon & Schuster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_%26_Schuster