Hacker News Reader

Comment by dececco | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think recording an audiobook with human-level quality is "simple"

It is, though, I've just done it a few days back. Once you have a clean text extracted from the book (this is actually the difficult part, removing headers, footers, footnote references, etc.), you can feed it into edge-tts (I recommend the Ava voice) and you get something that is, in my opinion, better than most human performers. Not perfect, but humans aren't either (I'm currently listening to a book performed by a human who pronounces GNU like G-N-U).

View on HN

Something tells me one of you is speaking about fiction and one of you is speaking about nonfiction.

Inflection, emotion, tone, character-specific affects and all that can really change the audiobook experience for fiction. Your mentioning of footnote references and GNU suggests you're talking about nonfiction, perhaps technical books. For that, a voice that never significantly changes is fine and maybe even a good thing. For fiction it'd be a big step down from a professional human reader who understands the story and the characters' mental states.

Agreed. In fact a great example of this is the Blood Meridian audio book where each of the characters seems to get a distinct "voice" despite being narrated by a single person.

You can find it on YouTube easily if you want an example.

I'm talking about both. I cannot listen to audiobooks that are acted, in fact, that was the reason I decided to go down the rabbit hole of creating my own.

> For fiction it'd be a big step down from a professional human reader who understands the story and the characters' mental states.

On the contrary, I don't want the reader to understand anything, I just want the text in audio form and I will do the interpretation of it myself.

shrug good for you. A lot of people including myself find audiobook fiction really hard to listen to if read with a flat automated voice.

I think how you tend to listen might also matter. I mostly use audiobooks when I'm driving or otherwise doing something else that is going to claim a portion of my attention. Following the narrative and dialog is easier when the audio provides cues like vocal tone changes for each speaker / narrator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com