It's Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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So you can take the square root of that:
5x+7integral from 5z to 9x derivative of deltaT minus minus multiply times 3. Figure 1
Figure 1 shows a typical lizard living in a square root.
trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
I like your way of thinking
I can get that for free. There are apps that will read an ebook to you already. The whole point of paying the premium on audible is the superior reading/acting. Not put up with mispronounced words, weird cadence and an inability to handle acronyms
I've tried one that works surprisingly well. Each sentence had great pacing, cadence, and correct enunciation- even had tone right when someone was shouting or angry or sad.
I wouldn't really recommend it, though. While I couldn't pick any single thing out that was wrong, overall it just didn't quite flow. It's like watching someone try to act that is technically doing everything right, but it just isn't good. It basically didn't understand the greater context of the story and was saying lines.
It was uncanny valley, but exclusively with voice.
Is there an offline tool that generates realistic audio for epubs as Mp3 ? Something like the free Ai tool, Vibe which is for transcription. Is there something similar for TTS, runs locally without complicated setup ( most are complicated using python and etc just for installation)
I've loaded epubs into the app ReadEra, which lets you read it like any other novel app or will, in real time, read it to you. It's not the most natural of speech, but was good enough for my commute when I was in the midst of a compelling book.
Download TTS Server, and change the engine in Readera to use it. Use the Microsoft Azure settings in TTS, much more realistic. Little slow though is my only complaint as it sends/receives a paragraph at time, resulting in a pause now and again.
Great question! I need to come back to this thread to see if something is suggested.
Looking for iOS recommendations, preferably without a subscription that can read epub/pdf
I'm an android user, so not sure if it's on iOS but I've used ReadEra
I thought people mainly paid for the large library
Beautiful, it works. Why not.
Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.
This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.
There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it's impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
There are thousands of books released every year. That's impossible to cover even in English alone.
Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.
In fact since AI moat is so minimal this will very quickly be adapted by open source solution providing audio book access to millions if not billions of people to whom this was not an option. Its amazing.
dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth
I'm pretty sure they'd be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
but for a service like audible.
Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
And you think anyone is training AI voice models for those languages? Have you even seen how long it takes even large companies like Google to support the languages with hundreds of millions of speakers?
That's the benefit of using AI and machine learning - once you have enough source material, you can throw it all in and it'll eventually spit out a model.
Which is exactly what Meta did with their Massively Multilingual Speech project which supports text-to-speech and speech-to-text for 1107 different languages.
Is it actually any good in 99% of them, I don't have a clue, but it exists.
Seems more like a proof of concept project for that paper than something they are pursuing seriously judging by the GitHub location in some example folder that hasn't seen any significant updates in over a year. If it is so great I would assume they would pursue it more actively and replace existing models with it two years later.
It becomes easier and cheaper every day. Today's open source LLMs are better than last year's best model.
Is it? I just tried again yesterday for a simple script since coding is the one thing apparently AI will replace people like me and it could not put together a working JavaScript script.
I have yet to see tangible results not announced by the people with sunken cost exploding their balls.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding the comment you replied to, they are not saying that voice AI are bad, they are saying there is not enough training data to improve the AI for these languages. How will it improve without good training data?
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