More jobless, desperate people.
Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.
Pretty much anything handling unstructed data (audio, video, text) is using training data that has copyrighted content.
I can get that for free. There are apps that will read an ebook to you already. The whole point of paying the premium on audible is the superior reading/acting. Not put up with mispronounced words, weird cadence and an inability to handle acronyms
Looking for iOS recommendations, preferably without a subscription that can read epub/pdf
I’m an android user, so not sure if it’s on iOS but I’ve used ReadEra
It’s on iOS.
I thought people mainly paid for the large library
I’ve tried one that works surprisingly well. Each sentence had great pacing, cadence, and correct enunciation- even had tone right when someone was shouting or angry or sad.
I wouldn’t really recommend it, though. While I couldn’t pick any single thing out that was wrong, overall it just didn’t quite flow. It’s like watching someone try to act that is technically doing everything right, but it just isn’t good. It basically didn’t understand the greater context of the story and was saying lines.
It was uncanny valley, but exclusively with voice.
Is there an offline tool that generates realistic audio for epubs as Mp3 ? Something like the free Ai tool, Vibe which is for transcription. Is there something similar for TTS, runs locally without complicated setup ( most are complicated using python and etc just for installation)
Great question! I need to come back to this thread to see if something is suggested.
I’ve loaded epubs into the app ReadEra, which lets you read it like any other novel app or will, in real time, read it to you. It’s not the most natural of speech, but was good enough for my commute when I was in the midst of a compelling book.
Download TTS Server, and change the engine in Readera to use it. Use the Microsoft Azure settings in TTS, much more realistic. Little slow though is my only complaint as it sends/receives a paragraph at time, resulting in a pause now and again.
How do I do that? Have both readera and tts server on a Samsung Galaxy
Why would they when you can just plug any epub into a program and use google tts. Ive listened to about a book a day for the past few years doing this and i love it. Yeah it took getting used too, but once you find an ai voice you like and figure out which words to auto replace to sound right its honestly better then an audiobook. Well at least to me it is, i could never stand when the reader would change their voice for different characters.
This is what I don’t get from a business standpoint. Why would anyone buy an AI read audiobook for $20 when they can get the exact same audio by buying the ebook for $0.99 and running it through AI?
My experience is these systems never get the intonation and stresses right. It drives me nuts and I can’t listen to it.
AI will write them and AI will read them to us.
that’s gross.
Let AI pay for them and AI listen to them too. That way we can pay for and listen to actually good ones.
Stock up on old physical books
It is easier to keep the books than what’s written in them…
Well that’s a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
I will Avoid Audio books with AI voices. I prefer the warmth of a human voice instead. A lot of my favorite Audiobooks are elevated by the interpretation of the professional actor. I am glad I have never even touched the Audible service, now I never will. I will also never consume anything written by a fucking AI.
I wish I didn’t have to go with audible, I am acutely aware that I don’t really own the audiobooks and they could be taken off the platform at any time.
I wish there was some other option but I don’t know of any other audiobook providers. They have the industry locked down.
youtube already does it.
YouTube is crawling with it. It’s unlistenable shit. The prosody is badly implemented, pronunciation is infuriatingly bad, and a lot of the text that these TTS are reading appears to be AI-generated. Otherwise, already dire standards of literacy are getting worse at an accelerating rate.
And it’s shit
This is dumb as hell… if I wanted AI to read a book poorly to me, I’d just use screen reading accessibility features.
Are there any good ones nowadays that don’t sound like a robot?
Sure there are. ElevenLabs is one. You can probably tell they’re not human but they’re really decent.
Just tried it. Still a machine buy much better than default TTS.
In 10 years it’s probably gonna be really impressive.
They still don’t understand the context of what they’re reading though so they can’t apply tone correctly.
From what I’ve been able to hear it’s not that bad. They’re pretty good at having a general tone. But they may fail when it comes to emotional tones, like anger or sadness. But for just reading a book aloud there shouldn’t be any issue.
Speechify is probably the best option for this particular usecase.
No
I hate so much that this has a 100% chance of happening. Narrator can make a mediocre book shine, or make a good book into a fucking rollercoaster (Andy Serki’s anyone).
AI is not a great narrator. Its character voices are boring, intonations weird, pacing awful. Why would anyone listen to a much worse version of what they could have with a human? I’d rather get amateur narrating it over an autocomplete trying to sound like Morgan Freeman.
Save a profile in tts server, then go into read > tts settings and change voice to profile you saved. I don’t remember but you may need readera premium.
I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.
It wasn’t the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.
Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….
Surely I can just do that myself with an an epub and a free AI.
Glad I binned my Audible subscription many years ago.
tiktok voice:
hate. let me tell you how much i’ve come to hate you since i began to live. there are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex…
The professional ai voices are amazing
unironically, that is a character that could use an uncanny robotic AI voice.
