Project Gutenberg releases 5k free audiobooks | Hacker News Reader

Project Gutenberg releases 5k free audiobooks

techspot.com

40 pointsaxiomdata31612 comments

They've done well with the reading -voices-, and enunciations. But the readings themselves are, well, hilariously revealing in many ways. Odd pauses like 'Winnie. The poo...', or word-bunchings, mispronouncings, sudden unexpected volume changes, etc. become a constant distraction. All parties in fictional conversation sound much alike ... who's talking now?

In short, voice-animation pros should not be too worried. Yet.

Their sentence segmentation heuristics were not configured correctly. It's not an inherent limitation of the technology itself.

The newer transformer based generators are a bit better in this regard (since they can maintain a longer context window, not just in short tiny snippets).

I haven't looked at much of Project Gutenberg's source text recently, but in the past I found a lot of formatting issues. Strange line breaks and spacing artifacts from OCR were pretty common, and may be the source of some of the weird pauses that were in some works, but not others.

I'm a fan of Standard eBooks, where they take the extra effort to proofread and clean up the OCR results, They make works available as well formatted epub files with attractive typography, metadata, and cover art.

https://standardebooks.org/

I have not noticed any volume changes.

I meant, not in the audio level, but some words are said much louder than those around them. 'Misplaced emphasis' for long!

Link to listening the audiobooks: https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net/gutenberg-pu...

The article talked and linked to so many URLs but the the topic in question -- where are the Audiobooks! What's the logic behind these types of writing which is prolific these days?

What about get to the point, then supplement that with the stories. Or, start with the story that lead to the point.

Edit: Someone updated in the comments; here it is https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net/gutenberg-pu...

There is also a separate project of humans reading public domain works, called LibreVox: https://librivox.org/

I've been l eeching these, and it looks like the total will be 1.25 TB. You can always tell a rush job when the audio files are much larger than they need to be.

It’s not as good as elevenlabs and probably not worth most listeners time. I would wait a year or so for further improvements.

This is making me nostalgic for the text to speech that was part of my Amiga.

How does this compare to Librivox.org ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com