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Apple Books digital narration

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Re: Apple Books digital narration

#201

Post by TheCoelacanth »

defen wrote: post #176
botro wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you do Hemingway, McCarthy and Joyce next? It's untenable they wrote 'unspecific / unclear / superfluous / awkward / anachronistic' language such that our robots cannot render to speech.

They write literary fiction, though. The selected passage is listed under "Nonfiction/Self-development"

"The Distant Shore: Stories of Love and Faith in the Afterlife"

It's a book of stories about her dead husband. Non-fiction, yes, but it's not exactly "How to Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days".

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#202

Post by southp4w »

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?

The Mitchell voice also sounds almost exactly like Ray Porter, another real audiobook narrator.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#203

Post by southp4w »

dpratt wrote: post #140

“Mitchell” is clearly Ray Porter, an absolutely phenomenal voice actor/narrator. He’s done a range of audiobooks across many genres, and anything he does is a pleasure to listen to. I sure hope that he negotiated a gigantic amount for his data/training set provided to Apple, as this tech sounds like it’s getting advanced enough to obviate a giant chunk of the narration business overnight.

Just replied this to someone else. Instantly recognizable as Ray! Phenomenal narrator. He and Nick Podehl are my favorites

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#204

Post by visitect »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #194

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.

I understand this sentiment. I've been an audible subscriber since 2002 and have listened to hundreds of audiobooks, mostly fiction. The ability of the narrator to provide distinct, interesting voices for each character figures prominently into my enjoyment of a book. This technology sounds fantastic, and will likely enable pleasant narration of texts that would otherwise never have it, but I don't think it's likely to replace professional narrators for a large number of cases.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#205

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ezfe wrote: post #116
carlob wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are never buying from Apple Books, it's the usual DRMed crap, more like a rental. Amazon had gotten a lot of flak, buy Apple is not any better in this respect...

If DRM works offline, it's not a rental. It's not desirable, but don't call it a rental, that just moves focus away from what the real problems are here.

Even if it works offline, it probably won't continue to work if you need to switch to a new device after their DRM servers are turned off.

DRMed content can never truly be purchased.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#206

Post by kmeisthax »

So at first I thought Apple had managed to undo the whole nonsense that book publishers strong-armed Amazon into doing where they can turn off TTS narration to make you buy the audiobook. But instead this seems to just be "hey if you want to use TTS instead of a paid narrator, you can". Already kinda shitty, but there's extra shit cherries on top: the resulting recording cannot be used on other book platforms. Only Apple Books and the DRM nonsense that killed public libraries.

So it's also platform capitalist moat building, too - i.e. a scheme to deprive Amazon Audible of audiobooks. The more publishers opt to use Apple Books digital narration instead of paying a narrator, the less audiobooks will be available on Audible. And yes, you are allowed to still pay a narrator and distribute that recording on Audible, but... if you could do that, then obviously you wouldn't bother with Apple's TTS system.

Of course, the flipside of this is that Amazon refuses to bother with copyright enforcement for books not on Audible. Cory Doctorow found this out the hard way[0]. If you do not license your work to Amazon, Amazon will pay someone else to copy it, and for some reason DMCA 512 protects them[1]. So I can see this winding up being a functionally unused service anyway.

[0] https://www.audible.com/pd/Why-None-of-My-Books-Are-Availabl...

[1] To be clear, I do not oppose DMCA 512; I just don't think DRM-bearing audiobook services that charge money should be allowed to disclaim copyright liability. DMCA 512 and 1201 should be mutually exclusive.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#207

Post by TillE »

r00fus wrote: post #172
patentatt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an audible customer I can tell you clearly that I often buy audiobooks by a particular narrator (discovering new authors) because the narrator is so good. I mean, Siri is quite good at reading texts (I imagine that's a huge training corpus) but I think we'll be in "uncanny valley" for quite a few years. It's possible that the public just gets used to that.

Same! I remember being really impressed by Justine Eyre in something, and then being a little disappointed to find that 99% of her work is romance novels.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#208

Post by RobinL »

splatzone wrote: post #137
dbspin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might be right with some of these criticisms about the ideas and style of the sentence, although I think most of these come down to taste and context. Grammatically, the sentence is easy to parse and a native English reader would understand how to say it out load.

Native English speaker here: I flubbed the first time I read it - specifically the 'all places wild' bit at the end.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#209

Post by adolph »

csande17 wrote: post #8

The "Helena" sample contains a pretty good test case of this system's ability to guess where emphasis and pauses go: > 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. (I checked in an online sample of the ebook: there is no punctuation in this sentence.) Unfortunately the AI completely faceplants, placing an enormous pau…

Perhaps this bug could be a feature?

  A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

  "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

  "I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

  The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

  "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots & leaves."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#210

Post by lvl102 »

rockemsockem wrote: post #190
lvl102 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re underestimating state of the art in this area. You can do amazing things with just a few minutes of readings.

No. You are vastly overestimating it. There is a reason there is no broadly available TTS service like there is for text-to-image. Anyone who says you can clone a voice in a few minutes is not talking about human-quality.

I’ve done a few models on my own. Stephen Fry is a relative easy one. This is from 2020 so I am sure state of the art is far better now.
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