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Comment by DanAndersen | Hacker News Reader

I'm most interested in its potential for audiobooks, especially of the vast array of old and less-common books that don't have human-made audiobook equivalents. I find myself constrained by the limits of audiobook choices, which tends toward best-sellers lists or pop-sci. Current attempts to use text-to-speech to generate audiobooks results in something that's frankly unlistenable. If TTS could get to a "good enough" point for audiobooks, that would open up a huge range of less-common content.

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I've used "Voice Dream" for this for years. It's brilliant. iOS/Android text to speech app:

http://www.voicedream.com/reader/

It has so many voices available in the voice store, and I've had no trouble reading books with it. I'm constantly amazed by the quality of some of these voices when played at high speed... They take breaths, express emotion, everything. My only problem is they occasionally mispronounce brands, names & acronyms: Quite amusing to learn about "Sharr-E-poynt" instead of "SharePoint", "Amd" not "A.M.D", or use an incorrect pronunciation of a character in a book when talking about the book... Can't really see how WaveNet would fix that, but look forward to seeing these voices turn up in Voice Dream.

Tried the 3 demos they linked to, the new Google one is so much better, let's hope they follow suite and improve

Shameless Plug: https://auditus.cc

Uses Amazon Polly for the speech gen

Neat! I'll have to look into this.

One of my co-workers told me in 2012 that he was doing exactly this. He used an ebook reader to download free ebooks from Gutenberg and then the IVONA text to speech engine for Android to listen to them on his drives. He had already finished a few classics like Treasure Island this way.

I'm sure things have improved significantly since 2012 so what you're looking for is probably easily done.

If your co-worker could share how he did this, it would be appreciated (specifically, what apps/code needs to be run).

Not the coworker, but I've been doing this for a couple years. If you're on iOS, the simplest option is Voice Dream Reader [1].

It can read .epub files directly, along with text files and webpages, and integrates with Dropbox, Pocket, Gutenberg, etc.

On Android, you can get Voice Dream Reader (though it has less features than on iOS) or @Voice Aloud Reader which is free [2].

[1] http://www.voicedream.com/reader/

[2] http://www.hyperionics.com/atVoice/

It also works reasonably well for academic papers as PDF. Equations get butchered, of course, but overall it's not bad (you can set PDF margins so that headers/footers are not read out aloud on every page). I use it to proof-read my own writing, it helps you spot things that spelling/grammer checkers miss.

I have been doing this on Android for a few years using Ivona, FBReader with the FBReader TTS+ Plugin. I got Ivona (beta) from the Play Store before they were bought by Amazon - it looks like Ivona voices have since been pulled and are no longer available.

For Android take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAHg31ucDhY

Google's "cloud-based" TTS (not the local one, which was terrible) on the Play Books app was pretty good even years ago.

However, it was unusable because it would stop as soon as the screen would turn-off. Other ebook readers' read-aloud features worked with the screen off. So thanks for nothing Google!

It used to stop; it's been well-behaved for at least a year. I use it daily!

That's not my experience, as I can turn off the screen and still read the book. I tested it just now.

Android is different for each person

For old books, I've liked https://www.librivox.org/, which has free recordings of public domain books read by volunteers.

This was kind of the target of the 2016 Blizzard Challenge (http://festvox.org/blizzard/blizzard2016.html), as the training data was children's books (clean audio, 'reading voice' prosody, etc).

Some of the voices that came out of that were incredible.

Are any of those voices published? Would be interesting to try rendering audio books with them.

I'm not sure - the exact voices themselves generally aren't published, but the papers are detailed enough that you could recreate the system if you wanted.

You should check out https://getspeechify.com/ - I use it all the time for exactly this. It also has a great team behind it

Wow, hadn’t thought about that possibility. Too bad for professional narrators of Audible (and other) audio books. I am a happy customer of Audible, and have some favorite narrators. Sad to think that they will lose work.

I am the tech manager for a machine learning team and potentially eliminating jobs is the bad side of my field. That said, I think AI, in some sense of the term, will also help us be more efficient. I imagine everyone having effective assistants that help us in our work, help with communications and scheduling, etc.

Yeah, I was thinking about exactly this. I'm actually going to try to reach out to the team to see if they're going to be looking into this. Google Books on the rise! Hopefully!

Also music generation - the original post (September of last year) had some really interesting music created by training the system on Chopin or something.

I don't have time at the moment to search it out, but in a previous speech-synth thread there's an in depth discussion of this. In short, people were pessimistic on wavenet as audiobook because audiobooks are all about knowing the story and speaking accordingly

But it will only get better and if humans can learn it...

I didn't say I was pessimistic on it :)

Ancient Kindle Keyboard can text-to-speech most Amazon ebooks with zero hassle (I think authors can disable it). 'Unlistenable' is in the ear of the beholder! My only gripe personally is having a single "narrator" for all content.

I agree "unlistenable" is a personal judgement, but there are very rare cases when buying an audiobook, even with a terrible reader, is not a better value/cost ratio than the original Kindle TTS, it was convenient, but not great.

Love this for company documents as well on my commute.

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