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…
I use the iOS Speech Accessibility feature to listen to ebooks and it works great.
Apple Books digital narration
181–190 of 244 posts
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Any book of any length took countless hours to write and edit. Yes, I think it's worth a bit of extra time for a human to go through and read the thing aloud.
If the alternative really is no audiobook at all... okay, I guess something is better than nothing. But on the whole, I'd like publishers to just record more audiobooks, and I'm concerned this technology will result in fewer "real" audiobooks being produced.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#183Earlier 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…
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#184"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.
The trick is that we have "pretty good" results for TTS as-is, but it has significant shortcomings that are more visible in certain use cases. The operative word is "prosody" - the cadence, rhythm, and pauses that are natural when speaking that are heavily dependent on context and content.
Prosody is incredibly important to making natural utterances - TTS models that do not model prosody end up sounding very "flat", which is mostly all of the heavily used TTS engines out there right now. This is less glaring for short responses like what you would get from a voice assistant, but becomes a huge grating problem when you try to do long-form text reading.
The trick with prosody is that it often requires information and context not contained in the text to be read. You would apply a different rhythm and stresses to a horror story than you would to a conference keynote speech, for example. It also requires a more sophisticated understanding of the content of text rather than simply its constituent words, in order to figure out proper stresses and pauses.
All of this is eminently solvable (as demonstrated here with the book voices) but is... rather difficult. I suspect we're not terribly close to a product where you can just feed it raw text (with annotating or otherwise providing additional data as context) and get a great result.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#185I'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.
Fully agree with this. I could understand TTS for quickly converting articles to audio (and of course for visually impaired ppl), but for books the current state of this tech doesn't interest me. The qualities I want from a good narrator aren't in these samples (correct emphasis within a sentence, variable pacing dependent on context). For fiction books, good narrators will change timbre and accents depending on who…
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#186The first versions of Amazon's Kindle did this. Then they got mired in lawsuits over it from the book industry.
Why the law suits. I would say: offer it with a big warning that this is automated and might be bad quality. Those books that have narrated versions can come with a buy extra button to have a professionally narrated version. For which I’m probably more then happy to pay. As an avid reader with 3 kids it’s nice to be able to switch between audio and text book, depending on my availability and context. As such of no pr…
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#187Or you could use the command `say` on the command line on any current mac to get good-enough text-to-speech. See full script here: https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/de3ccb244224d101bb93320... and this doc explains how you can setup a keyboard shortcut to turn any text selection into an audio book https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem... Here is a sample if you want to hear what it sounds lik…
I personally find that lack of character and inflections has completely turned me off of audiobooks in favor of podcasting. The typical monotone audio narration causes me to zone out into other thoughts and I find myself rewinding or just turning it off.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#188The first versions of Amazon's Kindle did this. Then they got mired in lawsuits over it from the book industry.
Why the law suits. I would say: offer it with a big warning that this is automated and might be bad quality. Those books that have narrated versions can come with a buy extra button to have a professionally narrated version. For which I’m probably more then happy to pay. As an avid reader with 3 kids it’s nice to be able to switch between audio and text book, depending on my availability and context. As such of no pr…
Because the contracts between Amazon and the publishers do not permit this kind of work.
Like, this is (legally) a pretty open and shut issue. Amazon has a license from the publisher for the book that permits a certain range of activities that are contemplated by the contract: showing short excerpts for marketing for example.
IP licenses are carefully constructed, often because the rights are sold to different parties. You may for example license a book to adapt into a movie, but the contract would likely forbid you from adapting it for a TV show. The publisher may sell those two rights separately to two different parties.
And these contracts likely either specifically forbid constructing an audiobook (automated or otherwise) from the original book, or at least do not contemplate it. That is a clear source of lawsuits where Amazon is likely clearly in the wrong.
Another reply here mentions that the publishes do not "like" that Amazon went ahead and did this without consultation. That may very well be true - but more importantly (and constructively) it's likely that Amazon's behavior is specifically forbidden in the contract they voluntarily signed on to with the publisher.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#189I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users. As a user focussed feature, it could read any audiobook out loud, and would differentiate apple books from any other audiobook platform. I guess it's aimed at authors, because then they can charge the author for the 'narration' service....
> 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.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quality needs to be very high for it not to be jarring. I stay with podcasts if the host has a "good radio voice". ("Not even all human voices are good enough for me.") It's just a very intimate medium to have someone's voice right in your head. If the voices have annoying quirks, those audiobooks will not be loved. Yes, it needs to be tens of hours of perfectly good narration.
I think you’re underestimating state of the art in this area. You can do amazing things with just a few minutes of readings.