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Apple Books digital narration

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Re: Apple Books digital narration

#211

Post by rockemsockem »

lvl102 wrote: post #210
rockemsockem wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm saying it likely does not sound good enough for the average person to listen to for a long time.

Got a sample?

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#212

Post by andrepd »

cprecioso wrote: post #13
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…

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…

"Our algorithm isn't stupid, it's the literature which is wrong" is not something I expected to read today.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#213

Post by rockemsockem »

dmitriid wrote: post #200
rockemsockem wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

Citation needed?

TTS tools exist on all computing platforms these days. The difference with this recent release is just that it sounds better. Apple would not be creating a derivative work, whoever uses it would be.

EDIT: It has occurred to me that they may have signed a deal as part of Apple Books that says they won't release tools of this nature. I don't know if that is the case, but that isn't the scenario I'm talking about. Just the case where there is a tool that can do high quality TTS. I do not believe that violates any copyright since it's a tool.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#214

Post by [deleted] »

RobinL wrote: post #208
splatzone wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#215

Post by carb »

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…

You can play with it on https://uberduck.ai/ and they have a very active Discord!

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#216

Post by enlyth »

GordonS wrote: post #133
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.

> 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. Are you able to point to any articles to help get started with this please?

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any beginner friendly tutorials.

The way I learned it was just by experimenting with various GitHub repositories (e.g. https://github.com/fatchord/WaveRNN or the one I linked earlier) but it takes a lot of trial and error. Might do a writeup at some point if I have time.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#217

Post by twobitshifter »

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…

By normal sentence construction it would be all wild places. It’s a good test as you say, the author is having fun with grammar to give you the idea that it’s a subset of places rather than “wild places”, so I would expect it to be written with a link between places and wild, “all places-wild.”

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#218

Post by AstixAndBelix »

andrepd wrote: post #212
cprecioso wrote: post #13

Earlier 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…

"Our algorithm isn't stupid, it's the literature which is wrong" is not something I expected to read today.

Have you ever read a written passage out loud and failed because the text was too contrived and the nature of the intonation only became apparent after re-reading the sentence multiple times?

I have, plenty of times. And in most of those times I got really angry at the author for writing "wrong".

So yes, to me saying that the literature is wrong is nothing unexpected.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#219

Post by idle_zealot »

carb wrote: post #215
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…

You can play with it on https://uberduck.ai/ and they have a very active Discord!

What exactly is "Open Source" about uberduck? It looks like a proprietary tts saas to me; no links to a git repo and the "developer" section just shows how to get an API key and hit their service.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#220

Post by FinalBriefing »

abraxas wrote: post #69
criddell wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Linux is a prime example of a technology that was at first far behind its proprietary counterparts but eventually dominated and nearly extinguished all non-free competitors.

For very specific uses. Linux is not a good options for general computers used by everyday people. That experience is still owned by large corporations.
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