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Apple Books digital narration

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Re: Apple Books digital narration

#131

Post by [deleted] »

dbspin wrote: post #52
ClassyJacket wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand that sentence fine, I don't see anything wrong with it.

Writer here, it's a terrible sentence. "I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild." "Deep currents of spiritual yearning" is both cliched and unspecific / unclear. "That" is superfluous. It's unclear how Bill is expressing the beauty he sees, and the sentence structure implies he's somehow responsible for the natura…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#132

Post by klondike_klive »

leokennis wrote: post #72
cprecioso wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is more of a case of garbage in - garbage out. The original sentence itself is not well-structured. But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. I don't feel like this is a product for carefully producing audiobooks, but to create them by the pound, so to speak. I'd say it's a move for the "make your own business through audiobooks" people [1] -- very strange for A…

To me this feels like the automated video slideshows that Apple Photos (and undoubtedly Google Photos) makes for you. Perfectly fine, but indeed even on a casual watch you notice mistakes/imperfections you'd never make if you were producing such slideshow manually. But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? I think almost any audiobook listener will vastl…

I find those slideshows unintentionally hilarious - ten photos of my kid interspersed with a flash photo of the back of the washing machine and some cable that's hanging down underneath my car, an accidental screen grab of a text message, all treated with the same importance and jaunty library soundtrack.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#133

Post by GordonS »

enlyth wrote: post #46
bongobingo1 wrote: post #6

Will we see this level of voice synthesis in the public domain? Maybe I am out of touch but I found those examples very impressive - more impressive than the jobs vs rogan demo a few months back. But I am also saddened at a future where all this is locked up in corporate hands - obviously there is money needed and (licensed) data needed too which Apple can get at. Honestly I would rather eschew the ethics of it and j…

This is already easily achievable on consumer hardware, you can train something like Tacotron 2 + WaveRNN on your own computer to achieve similar, if not better results. Check out this repo: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS You can also clone someone's voice by finetuning a pretrained LJSpeech model and training a vocoder from scratch, I've had great success with as little as 15 minutes of speech.

> You can also clone someone's voice by finetuning a pretrained LJSpeech model and training a vocoder from scratch, I've had great success with as little as 15 minutes of speech.

Are you able to point to any articles to help get started with this please?

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#134

Post by thomasahle »

ghaff wrote: post #105

I'm skeptical given the state of the art. There is way more good audio content out there than I have the time/interest to listen too and I can't believe I'm that atypical. And a book is a relatively big listening time commitment. I'll happily pay a few dollars more for a good human narrator.

I have a bunch of books on my "to read" list, that still don't have a narration. I would happily listen to an AI version as an alternative.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#135

Post by ghaff »

falcolas wrote: post #130
ghaff wrote: post #105

I'm skeptical given the state of the art. There is way more good audio content out there than I have the time/interest to listen too and I can't believe I'm that atypical. And a book is a relatively big listening time commitment. I'll happily pay a few dollars more for a good human narrator.

A couple of comments from a narrator whose worked through ACX before. First, the last few years have seen a race to the bottom for narrator rates, since during the pandemic it was recognized that it's a job that can be easily done from home, literally from anywhere in the world. Accordingly, the up-front cost for an average quality 10 hour book is only about $1,500, and can be turned around in under two weeks from a…

Thanks for the insights.

That doesn't really surprise me. On the flip side, I can get high quality transcriptions for $1/minute (given good audio quality).

People, even those with better than average talent at some things, just often aren't that expensive. I suspect the same is true for some of the generative AI tasks that people are all excited about--new grad English majors are pretty cheap, especially if they can be assisted by search/generative AI.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#136

Post by sigmar »

ghaff wrote: post #105

I'm skeptical given the state of the art. There is way more good audio content out there than I have the time/interest to listen too and I can't believe I'm that atypical. And a book is a relatively big listening time commitment. I'll happily pay a few dollars more for a good human narrator.

Fully agree with this. I could understand TTS for quickly converting articles to audio (and of course for visually impaired ppl), but for books the current state of this tech doesn't interest me. The qualities I want from a good narrator aren't in these samples (correct emphasis within a sentence, variable pacing dependent on context). For fiction books, good narrators will change timbre and accents depending on who is speaking in the text, not clear if they tried to achieve this at all (could have potential to use a different digital voice entirely).

I hope that the results from this type of production are clearly labeled as computer generated in the store. I don't think putting "AB Apple Books" is clear or sufficient, for someone that doesn't know about this tech "AB" sort of looks like a placeholder for some unnamed human.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#137

Post by splatzone »

dbspin wrote: post #52
ClassyJacket wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand that sentence fine, I don't see anything wrong with it.

Writer here, it's a terrible sentence. "I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild." "Deep currents of spiritual yearning" is both cliched and unspecific / unclear. "That" is superfluous. It's unclear how Bill is expressing the beauty he sees, and the sentence structure implies he's somehow responsible for the natura…

You might be right with some of these criticisms about the ideas and style of the sentence, although I think most of these come down to taste and context.

Grammatically, the sentence is easy to parse and a native English reader would understand how to say it out load.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#138

Post by 33955985 »

drexlspivey wrote: post #123
vortegne wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often there are clear voice and accent differences. Are you saying there aren't? That would be a very strange statement.

Accent depends on where you were born/raised, not on your race.

For the purposes of this discussion, this is a distinction without a difference. “Black voice” is a term of art, meant to convey that the voices in question were trained on features commonly associated with African American English. The voices in the example are US English voices.

Race, ethnicity, accent, language — all of these are complex topics with plenty of nuances. Short of writing a dissertation, no simple reply on a web forum will appropriately capture them. The good news is, we don’t need to, since most Americans are familiar with African American English, whether they know the term itself or not, because African Americans have constituted a distinct culture in the US for all of the country’s history.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#139

Post by ghaff »

dbspin wrote: post #52
ClassyJacket wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand that sentence fine, I don't see anything wrong with it.

Writer here, it's a terrible sentence. "I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild." "Deep currents of spiritual yearning" is both cliched and unspecific / unclear. "That" is superfluous. It's unclear how Bill is expressing the beauty he sees, and the sentence structure implies he's somehow responsible for the natura…

I don't find anything terrible about it. I'd probably break it into two sentences but that's mostly down to my style.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#140

Post by dpratt »

“Mitchell” is clearly Ray Porter, an absolutely phenomenal voice actor/narrator. He’s done a range of audiobooks across many genres, and anything he does is a pleasure to listen to.

I sure hope that he negotiated a gigantic amount for his data/training set provided to Apple, as this tech sounds like it’s getting advanced enough to obviate a giant chunk of the narration business overnight.

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