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Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

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Re: Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

#21

Post by noisem4ker »

TOGoS wrote: post #3

The demo video doesn't seem to have any audio in it! At least none that either ffmpeg or whatever Firefox uses can recognize.

It's probably due to the unusual sound format, 24kHz mono PCM, and the fact that it was somehow forced into a WebM container, which only supports Vorbis and Opus officially.

It looks like the author created it using the "higher quality" ffmpeg command line, except for the "webm" final extension, producing the opposite of what's described as "an MP4 file that's compatible with more devices".

https://github.com/denizsafak/abogen/tree/main/demo#for-high...

Re: Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

#22

Post by BenGosub »

anotherpaul wrote: post #7

Does it turn it into spoken word or an audiobook? Because good audiobooks often have voice actors that read the characters with different emphasis and dialects. I imagine tools like chatgpt could do this for a few sentences but what about an 8-20 hour audiobook? I think there are still basic hurdles to take before we can go epub to audiobook in a quality that can compete with current state of the art. Or am I missing…

There are a few character voices that also can be mixed using the mixer, achieving different nuances. You can then write your own code to use different voices for different characters.

Re: Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

#23

Post by baxtr »

dsign wrote: post #18

Nice! As an aside, while this tool can be used to create an audiobook from a book you have in text format, for your private consumption, having an author employ something like this to create files for distribution is extremely risky, even if they acknowledge its use and intend those files to only be available on their website. Indie authors struggle a lot to promote their works, and the new normal is that potential r…

I am big time user of Amazon’s WhisperSync feature. With that feature I can simultaneously read the book and listen to it.

This is especially helpful when you’re on the go but still want to have a visual now and then or highlight text for later.

The problem is that many books don’t offer that feature. There is a built-in read function now in the kindle app, but it’s crap.

So, if you ask me, I’d prefer a good human-written book with an additional AI voice on top to enable that feature for me.

Re: Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

#24

Post by mnmalst »

jamilton wrote: post #10
TOGoS wrote: post #3

The demo video doesn't seem to have any audio in it! At least none that either ffmpeg or whatever Firefox uses can recognize.

Same here, but it worked when I opened it in Chrome. What a weird error - you would think that playing an embedded mp4 with audio wouldn't differ from browser to browser.

I was surprised by this as well at first but thinking about it, it would make sense when they use an audio codec which is not supported on the target system. In that case the video can still play but the audio can't. I wasn't aware tho that audio can be disabled separately.

Re: Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

#25

Post by noisem4ker »

ertian wrote: post #13
TOGoS wrote: post #3

The demo video doesn't seem to have any audio in it! At least none that either ffmpeg or whatever Firefox uses can recognize.

Yeah, I've run a local Kokoro instance, and it doesn't work with Firefox. This uses Kokoro under the hood.

The demo clip is static and has the Kokoro output encoded as the audio track. It's not Kokoro running and generating it in your browser in real time.

Re: Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

#29

Post by porker »

scotty79 wrote: post #17

I think the quality of the voice is super important for audiobooks and I think we are just closing in on the required quality with TTS. I played a bit with Eleven labs voices and while they aren't bad when I tried make them read fragment of a text that I wrote, it sounded chaotic, boring, quite terrible, for anything longer than a sentence or two. But when I tried their v3 voices which they are currently in the proce…

Strong agree that voice quality (and voice acting) is important. I listen to a lot of fiction audiobooks, and will listen to the end of a middling book with a good narrator, but if the narration is flat or out of keeping with the characters I'll stop after a chapter or two.

Re: Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

#30

Post by vorgol »

jamilton wrote: post #12
anotherpaul wrote: post #7

Does it turn it into spoken word or an audiobook? Because good audiobooks often have voice actors that read the characters with different emphasis and dialects. I imagine tools like chatgpt could do this for a few sentences but what about an 8-20 hour audiobook? I think there are still basic hurdles to take before we can go epub to audiobook in a quality that can compete with current state of the art. Or am I missing…

Elevenlabs has a feature for a "full cast"-type generation, where different characters will get different voices. It's certainly not automatically sensitive to dialect though. It's probably possible with current systems to do though. I believe there are TTS systems that can use context/prompting to change emphasis and other speech qualities, though I'm not sure how reliably.

Have you heard results from it? How does it know for example, when there is a romantic scene in the book, which voice to read out as?

It's definitely an exited voice, but is it read out as in a battle or as in a romantic scene?

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