There are other open source models that produce very good quality:
F5-TTS
FishTTS (they changed their license to make money)
I also did some experiments with CoquiTTS, but FishTTS was the most promising in german language samples.
Along with X-Whisper it is possible to use epubs along with narrated audio files to train your favorite narrator's voice instead of only using inference or generated voices. The output quality is really good, however, these cannot be released to the public :-) I'm especially targeting book series with many parts where the publisher has switched narrators or fully stopped releasing later parts.
Audible has also started releasing some of their more underdog books with an ElevenLabs narration in different languages. The AI is still noticable but the quality is pretty impressive.
the eval agent you're running 8-10 wide is the part i'd want more detail on. silent chapter drops and dupes were the only extraction failures that ever bit me, and grading those automatically needs a ground-truth toc to diff against, which the epubs that lie about their spine never give you.
Looks very cool, would love to give it a go. A lot of the time an audible book can be ruined by the narration rather than the writing. would be good to try out a few different voices.
Might just be being dense but I tried to drag and drop alice in wonderland and it's complaining that the file is too large. How should one try it out?
Thanks for checking it out! The Alice link is a generated m4b, so it’s sample output that you could likely play back directly in your browser, although that may not have the cover display or chapter listing. I recommend Apple Books or Plappa on iOS, or Audiobookshelf on Android. For desktop, VLC still rules the day for general media playback, but Audibly is a Windows app that has good reviews.
There are many public domain epub files online which you could use as input. One excellent source is https://www.gutenberg.org/
Nice, Kokoro really is the jump that made long-form listenable without the legacy-TTS fatigue. I went down almost the same path: hated the e-reader TTS, found the newer models, and ended up building a hosted audiobook service (tomevox) on a similar GPU pipeline.
Two things that ate most of the time once the TTS itself was good enough, in case they save you some. First, pronunciation of names and invented words: a per-book lexicon helped more than swapping models. Second, chapter-boundary handling for clean M4B chapter markers. Raw generation ended up being maybe 30% of the work; manuscript prep and a human QA pass before delivery were the rest. How are you handling pronunciation overrides?
I checked out your product - nice! I think we have a similar approach for a different audience. EbookAloud is basically just a two-click conversion system more geared towards consumers than content creators. Upload an epub, get an audiobook. Users will have to live with mispronounced names, etc.
Content parsing and chapter alignment were also the better part of the work here. Laying out an epub on screen is straightforward. Extracting text by chapter without duplication or elision took a lot of iterations. I could not ultimately follow the epub spec recommendation to traverse the spine, but had to rely on the TOC to drive extraction or fallback to some simple heuristics if none was present. It’s still the biggest risk area in the code and why I added a detailed chapter breakdown before asking for payment. I’ve pushed a lot of content from a wide range of sources through the code for manual and semi-automated inspection and decided it’s good enough to go live.
There are other open source models that produce very good quality:
I also did some experiments with CoquiTTS, but FishTTS was the most promising in german language samples.Along with X-Whisper it is possible to use epubs along with narrated audio files to train your favorite narrator's voice instead of only using inference or generated voices. The output quality is really good, however, these cannot be released to the public :-) I'm especially targeting book series with many parts where the publisher has switched narrators or fully stopped releasing later parts.
Audible has also started releasing some of their more underdog books with an ElevenLabs narration in different languages. The AI is still noticable but the quality is pretty impressive.
the eval agent you're running 8-10 wide is the part i'd want more detail on. silent chapter drops and dupes were the only extraction failures that ever bit me, and grading those automatically needs a ground-truth toc to diff against, which the epubs that lie about their spine never give you.
Looks very cool, would love to give it a go. A lot of the time an audible book can be ruined by the narration rather than the writing. would be good to try out a few different voices.
Might just be being dense but I tried to drag and drop alice in wonderland and it's complaining that the file is too large. How should one try it out?
Thanks for checking it out! The Alice link is a generated m4b, so it’s sample output that you could likely play back directly in your browser, although that may not have the cover display or chapter listing. I recommend Apple Books or Plappa on iOS, or Audiobookshelf on Android. For desktop, VLC still rules the day for general media playback, but Audibly is a Windows app that has good reviews.
There are many public domain epub files online which you could use as input. One excellent source is https://www.gutenberg.org/
Nice, Kokoro really is the jump that made long-form listenable without the legacy-TTS fatigue. I went down almost the same path: hated the e-reader TTS, found the newer models, and ended up building a hosted audiobook service (tomevox) on a similar GPU pipeline.
Two things that ate most of the time once the TTS itself was good enough, in case they save you some. First, pronunciation of names and invented words: a per-book lexicon helped more than swapping models. Second, chapter-boundary handling for clean M4B chapter markers. Raw generation ended up being maybe 30% of the work; manuscript prep and a human QA pass before delivery were the rest. How are you handling pronunciation overrides?
I checked out your product - nice! I think we have a similar approach for a different audience. EbookAloud is basically just a two-click conversion system more geared towards consumers than content creators. Upload an epub, get an audiobook. Users will have to live with mispronounced names, etc.
Content parsing and chapter alignment were also the better part of the work here. Laying out an epub on screen is straightforward. Extracting text by chapter without duplication or elision took a lot of iterations. I could not ultimately follow the epub spec recommendation to traverse the spine, but had to rely on the TOC to drive extraction or fallback to some simple heuristics if none was present. It’s still the biggest risk area in the code and why I added a detailed chapter breakdown before asking for payment. I’ve pushed a lot of content from a wide range of sources through the code for manual and semi-automated inspection and decided it’s good enough to go live.
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