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The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

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Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#91

Post by jzb »

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…

I forget the exact quote but the thing I've seen making the rounds sums it up pretty well: Computers were supposed to do the work so people could make art and write poetry. Now the computers are making art and writing poetry and I still have to have a job.

In another life I'd love to do voice over work. (I even have a face for radio!) But, instead, technology is being used to avoid even having humans do that type of work. Sure, today it's PG, but they're definitely doing this with an eye to replacing actual voiceover actors.

Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and save money?" and not "how can people have better lives and work less?" And it's going to continue until it's "what the fuck do we do with all these jobless people who've been replaced?"

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#92

Post by jtbayly »

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.

How does it feel to have websites and books and newspapers and practically every other place silently ignore your double spaces and treat them as a single space?

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#95

Post by dirtyid »

Borrible wrote: post #16

Sounded 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.

It's getting more passable. As someone who listens to a lot of TTS at high speed for years, eventually I adapted my brain do it and now it feels similar to phsyical reading with subvocalization where I can adjust the voices of characters. It's occasionally even preferrable, i.e. too much over produced podcasts these days where I just TTS the transcript.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#96

Post by dirtyid »

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…

>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.

AI TTS still uncanny valley enough to distract. I prefer even more soulless traditional TTS which sounds "neutral" after habituation. To the point where my brain can start layering on characterization as if I was reading. AI TTS feels like listening to to medicore voice actor, where it's hard to overwrite their creative choices, so just left disapointmented and annoyed.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#99

Post by thinkmassive »

prepend wrote: post #88
low_tech_love wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $15/month and you get to choose one title. I think you’re confusing audible today with audible of 20 years ago.

I typically buy at least two titles per month, and the best deal ended up being:

Audible Premium Plus - 1 Credit Every Other Month for $17 ($8.50/mo)

You can buy 3 more credits for $37.99 (12.66/ea). It’s also worth checking individual titles because quite a few cost less than the credits.

Correction: I guess I actually buy slightly fewer than 2/mo because there’s a plan for that ($22.95/mo) that’s cheaper than the 27.50/mo from my numbers above. I had that one for a while but ended up feeling pressured to use them before they expire.

Re: The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection

#100

Post by aedocw »

kwerk wrote: post #60
aedocw wrote: post #51

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. 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

It does not handle that. A PR to replace stuff like that would be fantastic, I'd love it - please do!
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