| I've been working on that for my hobby writing project. I'm using Elevenlabs' API and homegrown scripts to automate audio-generation and synchronization between text and audio. I have separate voices for the characters (and the narrator, when the narrator is third-person speaker). Below, there are some links to a section of a chapter that you can download and judge for yourself. This is a huge boon for independent authors, until AIs replace us as well :-) . Things I have learned: * A good human narrator could do much, much better, but the quality obtained this way is not totally terrible. * The possibility to produce a section in a matter of minutes is a huge plus. The thing with a book is that it's never totally finished. If you discover a problem after you have submitted your text to a human narrator and paid $ XXXX, there is nothing you can do. * Currently, there is no platform that I know of distributing and selling books like this. Audible only accepts audiobooks narrated by humans. To my knowledge, platforms that accept ebooks don't handle epub with media overlays. Well, Apple Books say they do but I haven't gotten it to work. There are no alternative platforms for audiobooks that I know of, but I haven't done a ton of research there. * The possibility to have more control over emotions expressed in the speech could be a bonus, particularly for small, overly dramatic parts of the narration. Coqui TTS new editor is a step in the right direction, but their TTS doesn't sound yet as good as Elevenlabs. Voicebox seems promising, but there is no way to use it at least for now. * Cost is a big deal 1/3. With my scripts, I pay almost nothing when I fix a typo, since most of the audio is stored in little bits in the database, and only what changes is submitted to the API. But the human time of a narrator costs much more, as it should. * Cost is a big deal 2/3. As a reader, I have learned that how much a book sells tells me nothing about how much I will like it. But only books that have a potential to sell can afford audiobooks. If I want to listen to a story too quirky to be mainstream, or from an independent author that I follow in Twitter, the chances I'll find it as audiobook are next to none. * Cost is a big deal 3/3. Voice narration is not the only aspect one needs to pay for. A good story needs an army of editors, proofreaders, and designers. Generally, the more an author or a publisher needs to disburse on those, the more bland and mainstream the book must become to sell and justify the investment. ----------------------------------- Note that this is a WIP. Book chapter with automatic narration: An epub with media overlays. It requires an epub reader that supports that standard feature of the epub 3 specification. Currently, and that I know of, there is Thorium and BookFusion for iOS. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U8XUB9xhu86JuketGH5WchM0obN... An MP3 track from the epub above: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-u89ee52VZzGZ0oTGC_az5Uqbfs... |