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Comment by qurashee | Hacker News Reader

This looks incredible! I’ve had an idea simmering in the back of my mind for a while now: creating an audiobook from an ebook for my commute using the voice of a specific audiobook narrator I really enjoy. The concept struck me after coming across the Infinite Conversation project here on HN. Unfortunately, I just haven’t found the time to bring it to life yet. :(

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For a specific narrator you can try F5-TTS, here's a post how https://eamag.me/2025/Voice-Cloning

Made this for my kids for Christmas:

- take an ebook in any language - AI translates it to German - AI speaks it using the voice of their fav narrator - a UI showing the text as it is being read

Now they can read Asimov, Kulansky, Bryson, regardless of whether a translation or audio version exists. :)

What about the copyright issue? You can’t mimic the voice of a narrator without their consent. OpenAI landed in trouble after using Scarlett Johansson’s voice in a demo.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24161253/scarlett-johanss...

No limitations on this kind of thing if you are in private use.

Forgive me for not knowing it was for personal use.

Indeed I was thinking about private use only.

She only won in that OpenAI decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Yeah, by my ear it was pretty clearly not SJ’s voice-likeness, although there were some superficial similarities.

But some people could have mistook it due to some regional accent similarities, though it would be akin to interpretation of any light southern drawl with a similar timbre as being SJ.

They also asked her for permission in advance, which was never going to help their case.

lol yeah. That made it look like anything vaguely similar would be an attempt to model SJ, and triggered due diligence by her legal team. Not filing at that point would be de facto precedent that SJ did not lay claim to her voice likeness.

Sounds like SJ has a better legal team that OAI did.

Kokoro really mentions that they used only permissive licensed voice

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