[C-Loftus]

I personally love using Piper to make audiobooks offline. I made a CLI wrapper over it and it works great for me [0] Honestly surprised more people aren't using similar offline tools. I have listened to dozens of audiobooks in the past year through this.

There is a pitfall in thinking that the most natural voice is the most important metric (i.e. many blind users still prefer espeak). Piper has a great balance of natural voice, offline convenience/privacy, and interpretability at high speeds. Still have not seen anything better as an overall audiobook solution.

https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook

[westcort]

I am excited to try it! Could you add a prebuilt release? Would it be possible to post a sample output so people can judge for themselves whether they would like the quality available?

[C-Loftus]

Yes I do have prebuilt rolling releases. Since they are categorized as draft releases, GitHub hides them by default, but they are there and should work fine: https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/

Examples of Piper generally can be found at https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ , and I added my program can be found at https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/tree/master/...

I added this info in the readme for you and anyone else that could benefit from it.

[westcort]

I could not find anything at the on the releases page (https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/)

This is what I see: https://imgur.com/screenshot-PqmyqhT

Do I need a GitHub account to see the draft releases?

[C-Loftus]

Sorry, apparently draft releases are private. I didn't realize that. Added an auto release. Here it is: https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/tag...

[westcort]

Thank you so much!!!

[nilsherzig]

Are your audiobooks mainly non-fiction books? I would really miss the personality a good speaker can give each character.

[C-Loftus]

Yes I mainly read non-fiction and I think your point is valid. That being said, I do listen to a fair amount of books that include interviews or travel writing with multiple characters and it still works well for me.