This one sounds a bit robotic and takes ~4 hours per book on my M1 laptop, so I'll keep looking. For now, I'm happy my current method - EPUBReader browser extension, which opens .epub as an HTML page in Microsoft Edge browser, which has a "Read Aloud" button set to the Stephan natural voice at 1.6 speed. Best sounding voice I've ever heard, speaks fast, clear, crisp, with natural inflections to the sentences, and if I want to jump to somewhere I just left click the text at that spot. And it's instant - no conversions. Downside is I have to stay in bluetooth range of my laptop, so I'm still looking for a good phone based method. Google Play Books works okay, but gets buggy at 1.6 speed.
Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
201–210 of 255 posts
Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
#202On the one hand, this is very convenient. Probably cool for some non-fiction. On the other, some of my favorite audio books all stood out because the narrator was interpreting the text really well, for example by changing the pacing during chaotic moments. Or those audiobooks with multiple narrators and different voices for each character. Not to mention that sometimes the only cue you get for who's speaking during d…
I agree with you, but also want to point out: New authors, self-publishers, can't afford tens of thousands of dollars to get an audiobook recorded professionally... This can limit their distribution. Authors might even choose not to make such version (or lack confidence to record themselves), so AI capable of making a decently passable version would be nice -- something more than reading text blandly. AI in theory co…
By observation the current approach is for authors to narrate the book themselves of they think their readers will want it and if they feel reasonably confident in their own narration.
Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
#203The page says it was trained on under 100 hours of audio. Then, the link says “we employ large pre-trained SLMs, such as WavLM, as discriminators with our novel differentiable duration modeling for end-to-end training.” I don’t have time to read the paper to see what that means.
Depending on what that means, it might be more accurate to say it was trained on 100 hours of audio and with the aid of another, pre-trained model. The reader who thinks “only 100 hours?!” will know to look at the pretraining requirements of the other model, too.
Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
#204in case you are wondering how audiblez becomes an executable in the PATH from a pip install audiblez per the documentation
... audiblez book.epub -l en-gb -v af_sky.
it does not, instead it installs a python package with a cli interface, to run you then have to prepend python and load the module like this:
python3 -m audiblez book.epub -l en-gb -v af_sky.
Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you need an android phone, and can't use a kobo or similar wink reader?
for ios you use Kybook on your iphone and your ipad. It syncs positions between the devices. When you go for a walk, opens Kybook, start TTS. When back home, open your tablet, you'll see the page TTS has stopped reading to.
How does this compare to using Apple's iBook or Kindle reader app and then the iPhone's built in text to voice (the female British voice is pretty good).
Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
#206Yes, because real narrator/actors are rolling in the dough. Let's kill one more profession with trash.
If it's trash then why would it kill the profession?
Because people will opt for readily-available free trash instead of paying for high quality. And then that quality isn't available to anyone at any price, so everyone loses.
If you haven't observed this in many other markets, you live an unusual (or unobservant) life.
Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
#207Can anyone recommend an open source option that would allow training on a custom voice (my own, so I'd be able to record as many snippets as it needed to train on) to allow me to use it for TTS generation without sharing it off my machine? Edit: I'll wait to see if any recommendations get made here, if not I might give this one a go: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
There is a fork here https://github.com/idiap/coqui-ai-TTS 'coqui-tts' Though according to the TTS leaderboard, Fish Speech https://github.com/fishaudio/fish-speech and Kokoro are higher. https://huggingface.co/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M https://huggingface.co/fishaudio/fish-speech-1.5
AFAIK Kokoro can't be fine tuned
Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I blame canned food and trains for solving the logistics problems that previously prevented massive wars.
Napoleonic wars beg to differ.
While they didn't have trains, the Napoleanic wars did feature the first use of canned food to aid in logistical supply of armies. You could argue that the lack of trains (and can openers) probably meant that they jumped the gun on starting giant wars. We Americans fixed that in the Civil War, to great and deadly effect.
Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
RIP to future top-enders that would normally have started out on the bottom to middle end.
Bingo. AI is going to destroy any pathway for training and accruing experience. An embalming tech for our dying civilization.
It's kind of wild to me that the future will look like the 80s imagined it all because AI killed the creative seed corn when retro-future 80s was the aesthetic.
Re: Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I blame canned food and trains for solving the logistics problems that previously prevented massive wars.
An interesting one I read was public schools and their creation of a national identity. Before public schools there weren't really standardized languages forced upon an entire nation, etc. The countryside was more one country/people/language morphing into the next, not clean delineated lines where country/language switched instantly. It was also said borders were much more open/abstract before the resultant shift as well.