Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 195 posts

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#41

Post by low_tech_love »

prepend wrote: post #25
xrd wrote: post #20

When I read Rikki Tikki Tavi to my 8 yr old daughter, we play a game. She asks me to change one of the words in the page and she tries to listen and see if she can figure it out. It is mentally taxing at the end of a long day to do that on the fly without pausing to figure out the word to slip in. And, my daughter is very sharp and catches them. I listened to a few of these. The voice sounds muted at times, as if the…

> But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party. I think the question is really “Will I be able to enjoy great books I otherwise would not have experienced?” For me, it’s not that these are superior or equivalent books to parents reading to their kid or voice actors; it’s whether I’ll listen to a book for free that I wouldn’t be able to afford $10-30.

Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify). If you’re not willing to go even with that in order to listen to an actual human, then maybe yeah, you can try AI.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#42

Post by petemir »

janekm wrote: post #29
xrd wrote: post #20

When I read Rikki Tikki Tavi to my 8 yr old daughter, we play a game. She asks me to change one of the words in the page and she tries to listen and see if she can figure it out. It is mentally taxing at the end of a long day to do that on the fly without pausing to figure out the word to slip in. And, my daughter is very sharp and catches them. I listened to a few of these. The voice sounds muted at times, as if the…

Elevenlabs is a lot closer to compelling audiobook narration (needs a better way to deal with multiple characters in a story without manual use of multiple voices): https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLa... (an H.G.Wells example I just asked it to read).

ftfy

https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLa...

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#43

Post by ta988 »

Pxtl wrote: post #32
xrd wrote: post #20

When I read Rikki Tikki Tavi to my 8 yr old daughter, we play a game. She asks me to change one of the words in the page and she tries to listen and see if she can figure it out. It is mentally taxing at the end of a long day to do that on the fly without pausing to figure out the word to slip in. And, my daughter is very sharp and catches them. I listened to a few of these. The voice sounds muted at times, as if the…

> H.G. Wells was read with a pause in between each period because it "thinks" that each letter boundary is a sentence change This is why I'm a firm "two spaces after the period" guy. Makes it unambiguous the difference between the abbrevs. period and the sentence-end period. Otherwise you get sentences like "Let's not forget that Dr. Principal does not care about this." which can be read in two valid ways.

Sidenote, I asked ChatGPT about where to put the comma and how it would change the meaning of the sentence. It got it right.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#45

Post by joshgachnang »

low_tech_love wrote: post #41
prepend wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party. I think the question is really “Will I be able to enjoy great books I otherwise would not have experienced?” For me, it’s not that these are superior or equivalent books to parents reading to their kid or voice actors; it’s whether I’ll listen to a book for free that I wouldn’t be able to afford $10-30.

Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify). If you’re not willing to go even with that in order to listen to an actual human, then maybe yeah, you can try AI.

It's not at all like Spotify. The library you get for $7.95/mo is very limited. If it was like Spotify I'd happily pay a hell of a lot more than that.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#46

Post by philomath_mn »

low_tech_love wrote: post #41
prepend wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party. I think the question is really “Will I be able to enjoy great books I otherwise would not have experienced?” For me, it’s not that these are superior or equivalent books to parents reading to their kid or voice actors; it’s whether I’ll listen to a book for free that I wouldn’t be able to afford $10-30.

Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify). If you’re not willing to go even with that in order to listen to an actual human, then maybe yeah, you can try AI.

> Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify)

Not true at all. Audible Plus gives you access to a tiny subset of the full library, the rest (which includes all the best titles) need to be purchased separately.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#48

Post by ecshafer »

xrd wrote: post #20

When I read Rikki Tikki Tavi to my 8 yr old daughter, we play a game. She asks me to change one of the words in the page and she tries to listen and see if she can figure it out. It is mentally taxing at the end of a long day to do that on the fly without pausing to figure out the word to slip in. And, my daughter is very sharp and catches them. I listened to a few of these. The voice sounds muted at times, as if the…

> Like Louis CK said: "Everything is amazing and no one is happy."

Everything is not amazing. Sure things are amazing from a technical perspective. But most tech advancements I think have been harmful to society in the last 30 years or so. Its awesome that computers are so powerful and we have awesome video and photos and can share things so easily. But technology should better lives, and not cheapen it, which it often does. Tech is being used to try and replace essential human lived experiences to try and inject advertising into it and extract money.

Technology can not replace the human, its impossible. No matter how good the AI is at reading the book, it will never replace sitting next to your parent and them reading it. No matter how easy it is to share a video or a photo, it will never replace sitting next to someone and them showing you photos, or better yet being there when the photo was taken.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#49

Post by tmountain »

I was kind of hoping this was going to be human beings contributing read aloud versions of Gutenberg content. Since it’s not, I’ll propose a cool project. Raise money to enlist high quality voice actors to create audiobooks from Gutenberg. Release these audiobooks to the world for free. Which books come first could be voted upon. As someone who has used TTS a Lot in recent projects, I’m not excited about listening to AI read a book to me. It feels soulless.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#50

Post by davidzweig »

Oh, snap, we've been working on importing Gutenburg to LR:

https://www.languagereactor.com/m/t_en_-

We're ranking them using the download count, and also this prompt to chatGPT (it's primarily for language learners):

"Is this text engaging and interesting for a modern reader, someone not into fine literature? Rate the text excellent, good, ok or poor. I don't want crusty, flowery, contorted language, talking about buttons and mannerisms and the hue of the sky etc."

Then, we're rewriting the ~1000 most popular books using chatGPT to modernise/simplify the text.

Using some markdown as an internal format, drawing from the gutenberg plain text and html formats, this will go to a github repo shortly.

There's translations, and then, need to look at current best TTS voices.

Post reply on HN