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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

#41

Post by gavinray »

logicprog wrote: post #38

I've been using this to try to make audiobooks out of various philosophy books I've been wanting to read, for accessibility reasons, and I ran into a critical problem: if the input text fed to Kokoro is too long, it'll start skipping words at the end or in the middle, or fade out at the end; and abogen chunks the text it feeds to Kokoro by sentence, so sentences of arbitrary length are fed to Kokoro without any guard…

I use "kokoro-tts" CLI, which has better chunking/splitting.

https://github.com/nazdridoy/kokoro-tts

It generates a directory of audio files, along with a metadata file for ebook chapters

You have to use m4b-tool to stitch the audio files together into an audiobook and include the chapter metadata, but it works great:

https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool

I've been meaning to write a post on this workflow because it's incredibly useful

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

#42

Post by RicoElectrico »

logicprog wrote: post #38

I've been using this to try to make audiobooks out of various philosophy books I've been wanting to read, for accessibility reasons, and I ran into a critical problem: if the input text fed to Kokoro is too long, it'll start skipping words at the end or in the middle, or fade out at the end; and abogen chunks the text it feeds to Kokoro by sentence, so sentences of arbitrary length are fed to Kokoro without any guard…

I just can't stand how non-deterministic many deep learning TTSes are. At least the classical ones have predictable pronunciation which can be worked around if needed.

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

#44

Post by logicprog »

gavinray wrote: post #41
logicprog wrote: post #38

I've been using this to try to make audiobooks out of various philosophy books I've been wanting to read, for accessibility reasons, and I ran into a critical problem: if the input text fed to Kokoro is too long, it'll start skipping words at the end or in the middle, or fade out at the end; and abogen chunks the text it feeds to Kokoro by sentence, so sentences of arbitrary length are fed to Kokoro without any guard…

I use "kokoro-tts" CLI, which has better chunking/splitting. https://github.com/nazdridoy/kokoro-tts It generates a directory of audio files, along with a metadata file for ebook chapters You have to use m4b-tool to stitch the audio files together into an audiobook and include the chapter metadata, but it works great: https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool I've been meaning to write a post on this workflow because it's…

I'll look into this! But I have to say I'm a bit attacked to the little app I've ended up habing AI make for myself lol. It's so cute, and its mine!

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

#45

Post by SirHumphrey »

ekianjo wrote: post #19
floppyd wrote: post #14

I tried Kokoro for voicing blog posts and articles and wasn't impressed to be honest. Right now Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS is a much more capable system with generous free limits (about 10 minutes per generation and about 90 minutes per day). Voices are not very consistent between generations, but for shorter pieces it's not a big deal (but will obviously be for books)

Kokoro is fine for TTS, but it lacks emotion. But for a model of this size, that is kind of given.

I played with ebook generation a bunch and find that (at least for English text) around 1B is needed to get something usable emotionally (Chatterbox is 0.5B, Orpheus is 3B).

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

#46

Post by em-bee »

baxtr wrote: post #23
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-wr…

yeah, i don't see the problem. using a generated voice, no matter how, only affects the audiobook, not the actual book. if i don't like the voice i can ignore it. i am part of a group that occasionally gets email from new authors wanting us to review their books. and some of them sound really interesting, and i'd love to read them, but i can only do audiobook, so i would be very happy if the author went through the effort to generate an audiobook that i could listen to.

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

#47

Post by nnashrat »

frumiousirc wrote: post #39

This needs to be run from an environment where `pip` is available as that tool is used during the running of the abogen app. Using `uv tool run abogen` gets you started but then the app hangs at model install time. `uv venv && uv pip install pip && source .venv/bin/activate && abogen` lets it run properly. Otherwise, it's a nicely packaged GUI. Well done! I tried a PDF and the UI to select pages or sections is good a…

I just converted a 110 page book to wav in about an hour with a RTX 4060.

I didn't have the newlines enabled though so it was pretty useless.

Enabling makes this pretty awesome.

af_heart is a great voice to me while af_jessica I find annoying. That is the main issue I have with audiobooks , the randomness of liking the voice actor or not almost matters as much as what the book says for me.

I knew this day was coming soon and I really am blown away. I have got so use to audiobooks that it is hard to actually sit and read a full book for me. I have about 20 books to convert that would never have a market to bother having someone read the book and in a voice I really like. Incredible.

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

#48

Post by NBJack »

gman83 wrote: post #43

I love audiobooks, but I'm a stickler for good narration. I've stopped listening to plenty of audiobooks because I didn't like the narrator. I guess it will be a long time before I can use something like this.

I recall one series where R. C. Bray had been doing the narration for several books, then for undisclosed reasons they replaced him with another narrator. The drop in quality was so bad I eventually gave up trying to finish the series (though admittedly the author(s) didn't seem to be helping much with the content).

Some narrators, like Wil Wheaton, are so entertaining to me I actively search by what they have voiced.

In general, I have to agree the narrator can make or break a series.

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

#49

Post by ratelimitsteve »

gman83 wrote: post #43

I love audiobooks, but I'm a stickler for good narration. I've stopped listening to plenty of audiobooks because I didn't like the narrator. I guess it will be a long time before I can use something like this.

Coming from the other side of this, I've had a good narrator sell me entire series in the past. The Grim Noir Chronicles is the first that comes to mind (idk if anyone remembers the terrible sitcom Perfect Strangers but he played Balki and in real life he has a buttery smooth baritone voice that I just adore) and anything that Soundbooth Theater touches, partly for Jeff Hays and partly because of the full-cast adaptations they do that feel like old school radio plays to me. I see no reason to use this over existing text to speech features. If i just want to mechanically turn patterns of light into patterns of vibration there's non-AI tech that will do that for free, and AI narration doesn't do what human narration does yet.

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

#50

Post by fudged71 »

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.

I don't think they do it automatically, though. I think you need to piece apart the transcript in their tool to decide which voice to use where.
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