Apple Books digital narration • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#191

Post by SurgeArrest » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 6:40 PM UTC

Would love to see one day AI used to read annotated text with multiple voices, so each person in a novel gets his/her voice and also narrative voice. Would be epic and actually better than most audio books read by a single person attempting to pretend to speak in different voices.

Was always frustrated that Kindle was barred from reading books, it is such a natural progression of capabilities. Leave up to the buyer to decide if they want to pay for the person, but default TTS should be allowed for all books, such that if I read book at home and then can continue listening during a walk.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#192

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

33955985 wrote: post #93

drexlspivey wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voices have a race?

Speakers of African American English have distinct timbre, rhythm, and cadences in their speech. There has long been a lack of these distinct features in TTS. Apple appears to have added a “Black voice” (though to be clear, there are speakers of African American English who are not Black) in 2021: https://www.consumerreports.org/digital-assistants/apples-ne...

[deleted]

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#193

Post by cjensen » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 6:57 PM UTC

alanwreath wrote: post #166

cjensen wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I totally see this point — I’m making a separate one for ebooks that aren’t getting purchased because they haven’t been (and probably never will be) narrated by a real human.

I agree with you. Apple making this an author choice avoids some authors being angry while enabling more sales for lower-volume books that as you point out, will otherwise not have an spoken version.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#194

Post by banana_giraffe » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

The biggest failing for me:

They don't appear to be making any attempt to have the narration use inflections for different characters. This is probably fine for nonfiction books, but for fiction books, it can make it really hard to follow when a narrator does this, at least for me.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#195

Post by drcongo » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 7:23 PM UTC

dbspin wrote: post #114

drcongo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind if I ask where you're from? While not really adding anything or altering the meaning (so technically it could be called superfluous), removing it here to my British brain makes the sentence sound lazy and I was definitely taught in school that it should be there. I do also agree that the sentence is terribly written in general though.

Sure. I'm Irish. I've been a professional writer for about thirteen years. Formality of sentence construction is context dependent. In prose there's usually little purpose and no solid grammatical rule for retaining superfluous words. Depending on the pace and rhythm of the piece - which in turn dictate interesting things like the readers perception of time. For example you can make time flow faster by using brief, t…

Fantastic answer, thank you. Thinking about it, it's literally decades since I last wrote creative prose, maybe my formal writing muscle memory was just kicking in here.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#196

Post by gdcbe » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 7:24 PM UTC

rockemsockem wrote: post #186

gdcbe wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The lawsuits were because Amazon just did it, without any author/publisher buy in. They just said "you can convert this ebook using our TTS with the kindle" and the publishers did *not* like that. IMO that is how this should work, any text anywhere should be convertible to auido.

It’s anyway just making it more difficult right, as ebooks can be converted anyway using an external program, many which have way to use gui’s. But i guess it’sas far as they can make use of liability laws

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#197

Post by enlyth » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

davidzweig wrote: post #95

enlyth wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already easily achievable on consumer hardware, you can train something like Tacotron 2 + WaveRNN on your own computer to achieve similar, if not better results. Check out this repo: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS You can also clone someone's voice by finetuning a pretrained LJSpeech model and training a vocoder from scratch, I've had great success with as little as 15 minutes of speech.

Check my other comment in this thread, you might try our dataset. :)

Will check it out, thanks

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#198

Post by urbandw311er » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:08 PM UTC

habosa wrote: post #160

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?

If she did she’ll likely be NDA’d up to her neck to prevent her ever admitting it publicly.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#199

Post by urbandw311er » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

tartuffe78 wrote: post #100

TacWitch wrote: post #32

Mitchell sounds exactly like Ray Porter. I wonder if he trained a model with them or they did it without his direct approval

Yea I immediately recognized him, hope he's getting paid for this.

He likely won’t be able to comment without breaching an NDA — my recollection is that the guy who voiced the original SIRI got in all sorts of trouble for trying to capitalise on it.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#200

Post by dmitriid » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

rockemsockem wrote: post #189

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 would absolutely get sued by publishers, but, I don't think that Apple providing a high quality narration tool with their phone which can be used on any ebook would infringe licensing terms. It's not like they'd be saying "Here is this specific title for you to read/buy/rent", they'd be releasing a tool with the power to do that.

> I don't think that Apple providing a high quality narration tool with their phone which can be used on any ebook would infringe licensing terms.

Oh, it definitely would. This produces a derivative work besides anything else.

> It's not like they'd be saying "Here is this specific title for you to read/buy/rent", they'd be releasing a tool with the power to do that.

That's exactly what they will be doing from the point of view of copyright law.