I put together a script to read epub books using Coqui TTS and I think the results are not far off from this. It's super quick if you've got a GPU, but it's reasonable too if it's just using CPU to do the text to speech.
The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
51–60 of 195 posts
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Fair point, the sentence I invented off the top of my head isn't perfectly grammatically correct but it's close-enough that it shows the ambiguity problem. It's a lot to ask text-to-speech and typesetting programs to figure out contextually which periods are abbreviations and which periods are end-of-sentence, and so having a hard text cue like double-space would help. Then typesetters would have a hard cue of when to replace the space with a thin-space (which is supposed to happen in the case of something like "H. G. Wells").
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#53I tried to listen to The Call of the Wild and it was impossible to follow since accents and emphasis on words are all wrong. I could barely understand the story. I guess AI has more work to do.
Yes, the voice sounds very natural and not computer-generated. But it gets a lot of, even simple, pronunciations wrong. There's a long way to go before this is genuinely an enjoyable and useful option.
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#54Shameless plug - if you download lots of audiobooks and need help organizing them and figuring out which to listen to next, check out Audiobook Locker: https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker. It's a desktop app (built with Tauri) that scans your audiobook folder and lets you sort, search and tag your audiobooks.
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#55This is cool. Narration of audio books is a time consuming process! I agree with some of these comments here about how AI narration can sound robotic though and may not be too pleasant to listen to.
However, for anyone who is, or knows a family member/friend with a certified disability, or is a veteran, there is a free program to listen to a vast collection of audio books (with real narration) provided by the US Government. Check out https://www.loc.gov/nls/ (Braille material too!)
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#56The first example I clicked on turned out to be a super racist book! Luckily the narration was repetitive (like a record skipping), a tonal, and with prosody that chopped up sentences to the point of near intelligibility.
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#57Oh, 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 bu…
If you've already determined the text is interesting to the modern reader, why rewrite?
Wouldn't it make more sense to look for texts that are thematically relevant, but with inaccessible language - and rewrite those?
I still shudder to think how this system will handle something like Shakespeare's sonnets...
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#58When 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.
Of course some style guides would tell you not to put a dot after "Dr" because "r" is the last letter of "Doctor". Similarly, the abbreviation of "Saint" would be "St", while the abbreviation of "Street" would be "St.", according to those style guides.
Meanwhile the GB military style guide says never to use a dot after any abbreviation, I think.
Also, the style guides I'm familiar with prescribe "H. G. Wells", rather than "H.G. Wells", but "H.G.W." if you're abbreviating all of the words.
None of this is of much interest to anyone who isn't an editor but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#59When 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.
This trick doesn't work across linebreaks (unless you adopt a rule like "treat the spaces in the nouns as non-breaking and do not permit a linebreak for anything that isn't a sentence boundary").
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#60I put together a script to read epub books using Coqui TTS and I think the results are not far off from this. It's super quick if you've got a GPU, but it's reasonable too if it's just using CPU to do the text to speech. https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts
Does this handle text cleanup? Eg replace Roman numerals so they aren’t read literally etc? May need to dust off my Python for a Pr if not