I’m very interested to see if/how the model can figure out to produce a different voice when a character is speaking and how to keep the same voice for each character across the whole book consistent. Especially the second problem is not trivial at all from my understanding of how neural networks work.
Apple Books digital narration
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Re: Apple Books digital narration
#52Earlier 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…
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 natural beauty.
"All places wild" is wilfully awkward and anachronistic.
There are countless better ways to say the same thing. For example the tone would be similar and the sentence more concise just to say:
'When Bill spoke of the beauty of nature, I could sense it inspired spiritual feelings in him.'
Or simply: Natural beauty inspired in Bill a yearning for connection to something spiritual.
Neither are great - because the central thought is unclear. Writing is to a large extent the process of expressing a thought or feeling. Clarifying exactly what one wants to say is a central part of writing and editing. The author seems to have failed to clearly define their idea or emotion, so its expression is decorated rather than clarified however you phrase it.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#532019 I did an "Ask HN: When will text-to-speech replace narrators"
Most answers did not age well I would say.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#54What accent is used by the first voice? It creeps me slightly, some kind of rz sounds...
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#55Re: Apple Books digital narration
#56I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users.
As a user focussed feature, it could read any audiobook out loud, and would differentiate apple books from any other audiobook platform.
I guess it's aimed at authors, because then they can charge the author for the 'narration' service....
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#57The OG Kindle with keyboard used to have text to speech too. It was killed by publishers who wanted to charge separately for audiobooks. If Apple has somehow managed to get the licensing for this, I might consider buying from Apple Books in the future.
licensing as in?
License/copyright for written form of book is different than the read form.
Author might sell the book rights to company X and audiobook rights to company Y. Company X can't do a text to speech version of their book without infringing on Y. Y cant do speech to text of their version without angering X.
Licenses are fun!
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#58I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users. As a user focussed feature, it could read any audiobook out loud, and would differentiate apple books from any other audiobook platform. I guess it's aimed at authors, because then they can charge the author for the 'narration' service....
> I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users.
Licensing. Audiobooks are a different license from ebooks, and trying to narrate an audiobook will infringe the licensing terms.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#592019 I did an "Ask HN: When will text-to-speech replace narrators" Most answers did not age well I would say. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20931541
The answers seem to have aged quite well! Apple specifically say that this is designed as a complement to human narration and not a replacement: some aspect of that is Apple protecting relationships with the audiobook industry, but it’s also fair to say that the humanness of human narration is still unmatched by text-to-speech. For many people, high quality text-to-speech will be good enough to enjoy but it doesn’t seem likely to be an audiobook replacement today.
That said, I suspect it’s less of a technology issue and more cultural: the current generation growing up on robot audio will have different expectations to previous generations, the lack of humanness probably isn’t an issue for them, so even if the technology can never exactly replicate the humanness of audiobooks, it may not matter.
(The text-to-speech on TikTok, for example, is often lampooned by people not of the TikTok generation for being disconcerting and annoying, whereas young people seem to have no problem with it… and that voice is much more artificial sounding than these Apple examples).
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#60I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users. As a user focussed feature, it could read any audiobook out loud, and would differentiate apple books from any other audiobook platform. I guess it's aimed at authors, because then they can charge the author for the 'narration' service....
> I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users. Licensing. Audiobooks are a different license from ebooks, and trying to narrate an audiobook will infringe the licensing terms.
Apple is big enough they could just tell authors "here is our new narration feature for users. If you don't like it, pull your books off our platform.".
No author is going to win a twitter flame war because they don't want a 'speak it out loud' button provided by apple on their ebooks.
Besides - all ebooks on Apple platforms already support this via:
Settings → General → Accessibility → VoiceOver → ON turns on the VoiceOver feature
This is just a higher quality version of the same.