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Apple Books digital narration

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Re: Apple Books digital narration

#141

Post by hidelooktropic »

patentatt wrote: post #128
rickdeckard wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm curious what the economics are here, because getting someone to just read a book can't possibly be that expensive, right? I'm not talking celebrity voice-over work, but just getting anybody with a passable voice to sit down a spend a day or so reading a book into a microphone? Does that really cost that much more than having someone sit down a listen to the whole AI-generated audio book to do QA? And then there's…

If you're talking about using a trained voice actor, yes, they will cost an hourly rate to do this, which is reflective of the care and training they put into their craft. One should also expect that they don't simply press record, and then do an entire read through. They will go back and try different takes on segments

If we're not talking about a trained voice actor, you may want to look at some thing like LibriVox, which is entirely volunteer run on public domain works, and while the efforts are appreciated, the quality is noticeably different.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#142

Post by ghaff »

dahfizz wrote: post #98
qwerty456127 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chat-GPT and StableDiffusion aren't perfect. They still produce weird responses or visual artifacts sometimes. But, it can be easy to move past these idiosyncrasies. I think the brain is just more sensitive to speech, because inflection and tone is a key part of communication. So even subtle artifacts in the generated voice are really obvious and annoying. Plus, as another commenter mentioned, books are long. An issu…

I don't find it easy to look past their idiosyncrasies at all although they can produce impressive results with fiddling and luck.

Listening to these samples, they're still robotic sounding to me just listening for 10 seconds. I can't imagine wanting to listen to a whole book like this given the option of listening to an even modestly-competent voice actor.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#143

Post by cianmm »

patentatt wrote: post #128
rickdeckard wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm curious what the economics are here, because getting someone to just read a book can't possibly be that expensive, right? I'm not talking celebrity voice-over work, but just getting anybody with a passable voice to sit down a spend a day or so reading a book into a microphone? Does that really cost that much more than having someone sit down a listen to the whole AI-generated audio book to do QA? And then there's…

You need to take into account that nobody can perfectly read a book first time. I've done a reasonable amount of short-fiction narration for audio magazines, and even with many hours worth of script reading under my belt I still fumble every third or forth sentence. So I need to re-read those, and then I (or somebody else) needs to find those errors and edit them out, replacing with the fixed audio. Then people need to listen to the entire file at least once to ensure the whole thing makes sense and I didn't leave out a sentence somewhere or something.

Audiobook narration is one of those things that is remarkably labour intensive, certainly much more than I'd have guessed before getting into it.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#144

Post by [deleted] »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #62
float4 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#145

Post by wahnfrieden »

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…

as AI requires larger and larger data sets and processing power (energy, money), how will public domain catch up to their wealth accumulation? it's not like linux where chipping away at functionality and incremental UX adds up sufficiently over time

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#147

Post by smugma »

klondike_klive wrote: post #132
leokennis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this feels like the automated video slideshows that Apple Photos (and undoubtedly Google Photos) makes for you. Perfectly fine, but indeed even on a casual watch you notice mistakes/imperfections you'd never make if you were producing such slideshow manually. But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? I think almost any audiobook listener will vastl…

I find those slideshows unintentionally hilarious - ten photos of my kid interspersed with a flash photo of the back of the washing machine and some cable that's hanging down underneath my car, an accidental screen grab of a text message, all treated with the same importance and jaunty library soundtrack.

This made me LOL, as I’ve had this happen many times. But much less so in the past 2 years, around the time iOS Photos started integrating with Apple Music.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#148

Post by rickdeckard »

ghaff wrote: post #119
rickdeckard wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. But this option will only be available if a critical mass is also willing to pay a few dollars more for human narration. In times of flat-fee Audiobook platforms the pressure to bring down audiobook production costs will only increase, funding a full-fledged Audiobook production for each book will only become harder to justify. Moreover, looking at what Apple describes here, they seemingly want to establish d…

That's fair and it's true of a lot of AI/ML versions of content. I still paid for human transcriptions of podcasts when I was doing them because the time needed to clean up the ML versions just wasn't a good return. But the day will certainly come when that calculus changes. I know nothing about the economics of audiobooks. And will note that there are free public domain audio books already https://librivox.org/ . Bu…

Well, an intent of Apple seems to be to break the price of an Audiobook into license and production cost, take control of the production using AI and pay only the publishing license, instead of having to buy the rights to sell an Audiobook as a separate work of Art (because in the end, their engine will create the work of Art from the written word).

Sadly I don't see how this will make Audiobooks any better than human narration could. It's more about streaming platforms taking more control over the content and have experienced people train their proprietary TTS engine along the way.

Just to avoid confusion on Librivox: They offer Audiobooks of works which are already in the public domain (so not only the Audiobook is in public domain, also the rights for the book have already expired). So it's a platform allowing people to make free narration of already-free content.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#149

Post by elil17 »

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.

To be fair, a lot of narrators are really not doing that good of a job. I frequently hear audiobooks that have been rushed through production - mispronounced words, strange cadence, and overacting. I'll take what I heard in that demo over ACX crap any day.

The current iteration of this technology is not competing with truly great narrators, like Tom Hanks or Jim Dale.

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