Creating audiobooks automatically with AI

The Watercooler
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This could be a useful tool in spreading buddhist texts in different formats:

Blockquote Project Gutenberg and Microsoft have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. This project aims to make literature more accessible to (audio)book-lovers everywhere and democratize access to high quality audiobooks. Whether you are learning to read, looking for inclusive reading technology, or about to head out on a long drive, we hope you enjoy this audiobook collection.

I expect free models to become available soon (maybe even via collab notebooks). We could use these to synthetize talks from texts in massive amounts.

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Hmmm Cool new tech, thanks for sharing. The voice is pretty human! But the timing and inflection is still very robotic… The combined effect is that it falls squarely in the “uncanny valley” to my ears… :confused:

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I think it’s just the matter of time before the tech becomes exponentially better. I’m pretty sure it will be enjoyable within a year or so if many people become interested in it and contribute to the code.

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