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

Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

claudio.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 255 posts

Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

#101

Post by basedrum »

freefaler wrote: post #66
pprotas wrote: post #25

I would love to have an e-reader that allows me to switch between text and audio at the press of a button. Imagine reading your book on the couch and then switching into audio mode while doing the dishes seamlessly, by connecting bluetooth headphones.

You can do it easily with non-DRM books (or DRM stripped books): For Android: - Moon+ reader pro - some paid high-quality TTS voices (like Acapella) For iOS: - Kybook reader and internal iOS voices (no external TTS voices for the walled garden) This works well enough to listen to a book while you walk and when you get back home read on the WC from the place you stopped. Additionally if you buy a tablet or an android…

But you need an android phone, and can't use a kobo or similar wink reader?

Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

#102

Post by baq »

megaloblasto wrote: post #98
littlestymaar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the printing press was the root cause for the century of religious wars that soaked Europe with blood, and was key in the revolutions that overthrown absolute monarchies all over Europe, I don't think it's as good as an example as you think it is. Death of a civilization doesn't mean disappearance of mankind or even overall regression on the long term.

Do you have a source for that? I don't think the printing press was the cause of religious wars any more than bullets were the cause of WWII

Easy access to the Bible text instead of being only read to, hence high literacy of the faithful, was one of the core tenets of some branches of Protestantism.

Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

#103

Post by GaggiX »

There is also this TTS: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper that is pretty good (depending on the language) and extremely fast, would be cool to change the script to user Piper instead of Kokoro in case you want to use a language that is not supported by Kokoro or it's too slow, Piper supports a lot of them.

Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

#104

Post by lyu07282 »

boxed wrote: post #99
lyu07282 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like with almost everything, its an active area of research: https://emosphere-tts.github.io/ We are getting there

Some of those samples sound like they are emoting in Korean while speaking English.

True, maybe an artifact of the training data, here is another one:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emoctrl-tts...

Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

#105

Post by thfuran »

albert_e wrote: post #56
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kindles used to provide this feature, but publishers and/or the Authors Guild stopped it, because audio rights and text rights are handled differently. In other words, when Amazon sells you a text book, it does not have the right to then also do TTS on that text and let you listen to it. There's some contemporary discussion of what happened here: https://tidbits.com/2009/03/02/why-the-kindle-2-should-speak... I think…

Yes the feature is called WhisperSync -- I used it many years ago and it was pretty good. I tried it while on a treadmill so it allowed me to follow the book with more focus without sacrificing much else.

Isn't whisper sync the current version that relies on owning both the ebook and audiobook?

Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

#106

Post by mikkom »

What I really want and hope that someone does is to make an audiobook service that converts books to audiobooks but so that each character has own voice.

Som audiobooks have this and I think it really makes the experience much more engaging.

(Also maybe some background sound effects but not sure about that, some books also have this and it's quite nice too)

Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

#108

Post by tkgally »

cwmoore wrote: post #73

The word “kokoro” means “heart” in Japanese, which I learned making the (heart shaped and paperback) puzzle books at https://www.kakurokokoro.com/

Note that kokoro (心) means “heart” in the sense of “spirit,” “soul,” “mind,” “emotions,” etc. It doesn’t mean “heart” in the sense of “internal organ that pumps blood.” That is shinzō (心臓).

I once heard an American friend with so-so Japanese ability ask a Japanese woman who had recently had a heart operation how her kokoro was doing, and she looked surprised and taken aback.

Side note: After I started reading HN in 2019, I was struck by how many tech products mentioned here have Japanese names. I compiled a list for a few years and eventually posted it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31310370

Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

#109

Post by plastic3169 »

credit_guy wrote: post #97
j4coh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RIP to future top-enders that would normally have started out on the bottom to middle end.

By that time, AI will beat the toppest of the top enders. Remember the time Deep Blue barely beat Kasparov? Now no human, or group of humans can beat a chess engine, even one that runs on an iPhone.

I don’t think chess is a good example of AI destroying the path to the top. Chess is more popular now and humans keep advancing even though it is futile effort against computers.

Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M

#110

Post by ajsnigrutin »

Just tried it, and "meh"...

It's one step above "normal" text-to-speech solutions, but not much above it. The epub has "Chapter 1" as the title on the page, and a lot of whitespace, and then "This was...." (actual text). The software somehow managed to ignore all the whitespace and reach "chapter 1 this was.." as a single sentance, no pauses, no nothing.

Blind? A great tool. Will it replace actual audiobooks? Well.. not yet at least.

Post reply on HN