This kind of work is a great candidate for a multilingual textspeech dataset
Free public domain audiobooks
41–50 of 67 posts
Re: Free public domain audiobooks
#42I love this, but the problem is discoverability. Not sure how I would find my next book on here.
Re: Free public domain audiobooks
#43Eventually TTS technology will automate all public domain books so they can be listened through audio.
In any voice you want.
Re: Free public domain audiobooks
#44Who wants to hear Edward Kemper (the serial killer, a tall, imposing “co-Ed killer”, who was also well read) recite audiobooks? Anyone heard his Star Wars reading before? He’s absent from this library.
edmundkemperstories.com/blog/2019/03/09/list-of-17-books-narrated-by-edmund-kemper-for-volunteers-of-vacaville-the-blind-project-part-1-of-2/
Re: Free public domain audiobooks
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
iPhone users can enable Spoken Content. Open an ebook. Swipe down with two fingers. Instant audio book. Also, you can select the Voices option (under Spoken Content) to download high quality Siri voices.
Thank you for the suggestion. I had been using Voice Over which is a very similar feature but not quite as good for reading ebooks and the like.
Voice Dream Reader is also very good on the iPhone. It can use any of the apple voices (download high quality versions in accessibility settings), and has other voices available. It can OCR pdf files that are otherwise inaccessible. It also makes a great audio book player.
Re: Free public domain audiobooks
#46I listened to Treasure Island[0] on librivox and was impressed with the quality of the voice actor (Adrian Praetzellis). Beware though, some books are fragmented and performed by N different voice actors/actresses which can be jarring. [0] https://librivox.org/treasure-island-by-robert-louis-stevens...
Another excellent narrator with a British accent is Karen Savage. She has read many complete works by Jane Austen and E. Nesbit, among other titles, and is as good as any professional voice actor: - 'Pride and Prejudice' (Austen) - 'Sense and Sensibility' (Austen) - 'The Story of the Treasure Seekers' (Nesbit) - 'The Railway Children' (Nesbit) - many others (says 141 total matches) http://www.karenrsavage.com/blog/
wow, that's an incredible amount of work
Re: Free public domain audiobooks
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
i am unable to do this on my iPhone do i need to enable it in the settings.
This support page may help: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/spoken-content-iph96b...
More to the point, I’ve had trouble using Siri to speak in certain titles in iBooks on iOS. It would drop words or entire sentences or paragraphs. It was unusable for those titles. Not sure if it was bad OCR on the source file or what. I haven’t tried it on titles purchased from Apple, so I can’t speak to that.
Re: Free public domain audiobooks
#48For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM. It's definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive's scanned book's OCR -> TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be profess…
> And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks.
I've listened to numerous books (mostly but not exclusively fiction) using TTS and I'd like to confirm this experience. It's kind of remarkable, once I became accustomed to the sound of the TTS program the weirdness just sort of evaporated and I was left with an experience that feels very similar to reading visually.
Re: Free public domain audiobooks
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've listened to enough TTS for non-fiction that it doesn't really bother me. In fact, I sometimes prefer the TTS over a low-quality narrator. TTS for fiction less so.
my problem with non-fiction TTS (or at least the non-fiction I read) is it often involves diagrams or figures and that really doesn't work with TTS, sadly. But histories are nice
In my experience, it works pretty well nonfiction that has a narrative structure, like histories, but doesn't work as well for more technical books, like those about programming languages.
Re: Free public domain audiobooks
#50For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM. It's definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive's scanned book's OCR -> TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be profess…
Amazon echoes can read Kindle books using TTS. It's not completely horrible.