Ask HN: Locally Run Text to Speech+AI: ePub|PDF –> Audio Book

5 pointsposted a year ago
by mrjay42

Item id: 43078741

9 Comments

zertrin

a year ago

Just a couple days ago, I saw this project mentioned. Looks promising but I haven't had the time to try it yet so this isn't an endorsement.

https://claudio.uk/posts/audiblez-v4.html

mrjay42

a year ago

Just coming back here for a little report. This tool "audiblez" works fine and out of the box.

Pros:

* works out of the box

* text to speech available in many languages!!

* Audio output in .wav -> easily convertible into something else

* automatically creates chapters based on the book

The limitations are: * the voices are very "AI"-style, so they sound emotionless, we're far from anything resembling any kind of acting;

* the conversion of a book into an audiobook might just crash if the script encounters a character that it doesn't know how to convert.

zertrin

a year ago

Yes I've also tried it and reached similar conclusions. Do update it to the latest version though, as I did report an issue with non ASCII characters and for me it got fixed in v0.4.7+

mrjay42

a year ago

Thanks, I'm gonna check it out right now.