I'm curious about the sub-domain https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net. Are these auto-generated? I'm guessing these style of subdomains are not named by a human.
The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
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Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#62Sounded better than the handful of random corresponding Librivox recordings I listened to in order to compare them. To be honest, a lot of people go to great lengths to make Librivox recordings without having the skills to read aloud. Which is a pity, but nonetheless.
I agree. I love the idea of Librivox, but the volunteers vary widely in quality. Some are non-native English speakers, some have lisps or other articulation problems, some have other marks of fluency deficiencies, some have under- or over-dramatic intonation, etc. And even if they're perfect voice actors, often their microphone setups are sub-par, and it comes through in the recording. Frankly, these AI voices are no…
> hiccups in the source material
From Joyce's Ulysses (capitalization possibly wrong): "nes. yo."
Good luck with that!
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#63I'm curious about the sub-domain https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net . Are these auto-generated? I'm guessing these style of subdomains are not named by a human.
Looks like Azure Blob Storage and 'marhamilresearch4' is the name of the storage account (think website hosted in a public S3 bucket).
Azure requires these names are globally unique and only allows alphanumerics.
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
thanks!
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I was going to mention ElevenLabs, too. Their samples are very impressive in how the intonation and word stress are varied based on the text’s meaning. Their pricing is a bit high for personal use, though. (The link you posted seems to have been truncated. Can you try posting it again?)
Yeah, sadly it'd cost about $100 to get a book per month... Not quite competitive with Audible yet, but give it a year perhaps, or a few iterations of the open source models... (fixed the link)
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#66The site is curiously broken in Safari browser.
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#67This 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 Gove…
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Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#68In sampling a couple I would call these narrations "serviceable" rather than "high quality". My benchmark is the voice of my mom reading Shakespeare and Grahame, with intonation and voice to each character. Perhaps AI authored narration could do that, but these haven't.
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#69Earlier 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.
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").
Emacs does (or did) exactly that, perhaps by default: I think I had to disable it once because it was annoying me ... (setq sentence-end-double-space nil)?
Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection
#70I 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…
I have used TTS in the past and in the last few years there has been a quantum leap in TTS quality. A similar such leap in the next few years and it will dominate the audiobook scene for good or bad.