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The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

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Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#71

Post by gnutrino »

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…

Seth Godin did a whole Akimbo podcast that was written by ChatGPT, and the audio was AI generated. The voice was spot on, the content and delivery was dead. I almost fell asleep listening to it, which is NEVER the case for any other episode of Akimbo I've listened to.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#72

Post by Pxtl »

bloak wrote: post #58
Pxtl wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

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…

> "H. G. Wells",

Right. That's probably the most common historical form, and is a good example of how the punctuation for sentence-ends and abbreviations is often the same - period and then single-space.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#73

Post by sequoia »

This has dictation errors in the very first two words, in the title no less. https://ia801604.us.archive.org/29/items/synapseml_gutenberg...

"Mrs. [pause] Shelly by Lucy Maddox Brown Rosetti"

I expected a bit better than this for a launch of "the next amazing cool thing"; distinguishing between full stops and honorifics seems pretty dang basic. As xrd said issues like this make the books unlistenable, it's too distracting and weird. didntcheck plugged librivox which is nice if mixed in terms of quality, I'd also plug "libby" for anyone who doesn't have it: check out audiobooks from your library.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#74

Post by hedora »

If you are looking for short stories, I strongly recommend audio fiction podcasts.

Escape Artists is one of my favorite production houses. The recordings are creative commons licensed, and the authors (and other artists) get paid professional rates:

https://escapeartists.net/

Other sites to check out (all are donation-supported and pay authors):

https://www.drabblecast.org/

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/podcasting/

https://www.asimovs.com/more-stuff/podcasts/

To give you an idea of what’s available, “Money in the Bank” by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling will likely sit well with the HN crowd:

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/money-in-the-bank...

I could have picked literally 100’s of other stories; this one wins due to recency bias and the authors cyberpunk roots.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#75

Post by hedora »

The_suffocated wrote: post #12

Great news. It seems there is still much room for improvement, though. E.g. in “A Short History of the World” by H. G. Wells, the AI reads Darius I and Charles V as “Darius Eye” and “Charles Vee”. Open and closed brackets in sentences are not read out. The intonation is also a bit unnatural. But it is intelligent enough to parse 1,782 as 1782 rather than two numbers. Another problem is that the audio clips are not br…

Some podcasts embed chapter start timestamps into the rss (atom? m3u?) metadata.

That way, you get one file (and gapless playback), but most players have a chapter skip button that will do what you are asking for.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#77

Post by hedora »

crop_rotation wrote: post #70
tmountain wrote: post #49

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…

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.

AI might dominate, but it would be a loss. Here’s a tutorial explaining modern audio fiction:

https://www.drabblecast.org/2018/07/30/inside-drabblecast-au...

(In audio format, of course; roughly 1.5 hours)

————

This episode takes you inside Drabblecast audio production. Ever wonder how we produce an episode of the Drabblecast? Wonder no more!

We dig into all the technical aspects like voice acting, sound editing and mixing, foley effects, music and more.

Preproduction? Reading? Acting? Yeah, it’s all here folks, all the blood sweat and tears that go into every production of the Drabblecast.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#78

Post by OfSanguineFire »

ecshafer wrote: post #48
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 oft…

> it will never replace sitting next to someone and them showing you photos

It definitely does replace that. It sucks so much to be trapped next to someone showing you their photo album or vacation slides, when you don’t really care, that this became a stock scene in 20th-century comedy TV series and films. Nowadays when people are sharing their photos online, that gives their peers the choice of whether to look or whether to ignore, and that is immensely freeing.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#79

Post by hedora »

davidzweig wrote: post #50

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 bu…

Standard Ebooks has the ability to filter books by reading level.

That seems much better for people trying to learn English.

https://standardebooks.org/

They carefully curate and copy-edit their books, and go for quality over quantity. I think that is probably the right choice. We already have free access to an effectively infinite amount of mediocre content on the internet.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#80

Post by crop_rotation »

hedora wrote: post #77
crop_rotation wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI might dominate, but it would be a loss. Here’s a tutorial explaining modern audio fiction: https://www.drabblecast.org/2018/07/30/inside-drabblecast-au... (In audio format, of course; roughly 1.5 hours) ———— This episode takes you inside Drabblecast audio production. Ever wonder how we produce an episode of the Drabblecast? Wonder no more! We dig into all the technical aspects like voice acting, sound editing and…

It might be worse than human narration, but at some point the economics becomes so loopsided that it's dominance is inevitable. One good thing I can see coming out of that will be an abundance of audiobooks of copyright expired books.
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