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Apple Books digital narration

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Re: Apple Books digital narration

#151

Post by smugma »

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…

> Writing is to a large extent the process of expressing a thought or feeling.

Agree.

> Clarifying exactly what one wants to say is a central part of writing and editing.

In professional/technical writing, sure? Authors have been known to have different writing styles, and the style may be ambiguous or convoluted to intensify the thoughts or feelings the writer is trying to convey.

PS everyone posting here is a “writer”

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#152

Post by troupe »

drexlspivey wrote: post #89
33955985 wrote: post #83

So happy to hear Apple putting African American voices front and center for this initiative. Along with Google’s push to make camera lenses / computational photography more accurate for darker skin (and Apple following suit) this feels like a real step forward for inclusion.

Voices have a race?

I seriously doubt you can tell someone's genetics (their race) based on their voice. On the other hand, you can tell a huge amount about the culture in which they were raised.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#153

Post by troupe »

ghaff wrote: post #105

I'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.

I often find books I want to read that don't have audio versions or the audio version is for a different translation than what I want to read. So if you are looking for specific things to read the (eventual) use of this type of technology to open up some of those in audio format seems useful.

(But totally agree with you that this isn't going to replace a good human narrator.)

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#154

Post by drexlspivey »

33955985 wrote: post #138
drexlspivey wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accent depends on where you were born/raised, not on your race.

For the purposes of this discussion, this is a distinction without a difference. “Black voice” is a term of art, meant to convey that the voices in question were trained on features commonly associated with African American English. The voices in the example are US English voices. Race, ethnicity, accent, language — all of these are complex topics with plenty of nuances. Short of writing a dissertation, no simple rep…

This answer might have ben reasonable if US was the only place on earth. When I hear Giannis Antetokoumpo speak english for example he sounds exactly like a Spanish/Greek person speaking English even though the native population of these places is white.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#155

Post by dagmx »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #68
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.

You’re describing the effects of familiarity with a subject.

Stable Diffusion / Midjourney etc look really pretty to the average person but on closer inspection they rarely hold up out of the box. If you’re an experienced artist you pick up on all the flaws right away.

ChatGPT and Copilot are similar. The answers seem confident , but the more familiar you are with the domain of the answer, the quicker it becomes to see how flawed the results are.

Now going back to TTS. You’ve spent your whole life knowing what speech sounds like. Unlike those other models that require an extra level of domain knowledge, everyone innately knows the sound of humans speaking. So you’re effectively, and subconsciously, a domain expert.

This is essentially the uncanny valley effect but for other areas.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#156

Post by Ruthalas »

kumarvvr wrote: post #49

Is it just a coincidence that only a few days back I saw an article or video about how low a payment audible makes to its authors? It was a famous author too. And now this announcement.

Likely referring to Brandon Sanderson's recent comments[0].

Edit: Previous discussion on HN: [1]

[0] https://winteriscoming.net/2022/12/30/brandon-sanderson-blas...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34104204

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#157

Post by alanwreath »

I guess I kind of wish they would just offer the AI narration as a feature of Apple ebooks. Such that, if you buy the book, you can have ebooks read to you by your phone. I am really just buying books off audible with the subscription they offer. There are some books (tech books that is) that are offered as audio books and I gobble those up. There are, however, many more epub/digital books that I never buy not because I'm uninterested in the content but only because I don't have the time to sit down. I assume that for said books the audience isn't large enough (and may never be) to merit anyone ever recording the audiobook.

There are certain books that I think I'll always buy the non-AI variant because narrators can bring more than natural reading, they sometimes bring different characters (sometimes more feminine, more baritone, more stereotypical accents) -- and I would melt if AI could do that kind of voice acting.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#158

Post by acdha »

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'm mixed on that because while I appreciate the craft of a professional narrator, I support a group of users who are mostly blind and there's a constant tradeoff between availability and the quality of an audio book. People value good recordings – people often have favorite narrators and will select books based on that, sometimes even outside their normal interests (which wasn't something I'd previously appreciated) – but if it's something you want to read, having it now versus a year from now matters.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#159

Post by cjensen »

alanwreath wrote: post #157

I guess I kind of wish they would just offer the AI narration as a feature of Apple ebooks. Such that, if you buy the book, you can have ebooks read to you by your phone. I am really just buying books off audible with the subscription they offer. There are some books (tech books that is) that are offered as audio books and I gobble those up. There are, however, many more epub/digital books that I never buy not becaus…

Amazon at one time tried to add voice reading to Kindle books. Authors were absolutely livid. Audiobooks are a significant income source, and taking that away from authors is going to make authors decline to sell digital books on your platform. Apple is doing this right by making it an author's choice.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#160

Post by habosa »

Whoah the Madison voice sounds _exactly_ like Julia Whelan, who is a real audiobook narrator. I have listened to many articles on Audm (narrated news articles) using her voice. I wonder if she had a part in this?
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