Going blind and learning to love audiobooks

Re:Going blind and learning to love audiobooks by szemet on Monday December 25, 2017 @11:07AM (#16004553)

I'm a big fan of the android tts. A bit robotic, with quite a few prosodic errors (which is simple to get used to), but so convenient. No need to hunt for audiobooks - actually in most languages the size of the audibook market is rather poor...

I can switch easily from audio to reading, e.g. listening while walking to the bus, and if I get a seat then switch to read, and then back to listening etc...

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Re:Going blind and learning to love audiobooks by johansch on Monday December 25, 2017 @11:35AM (#16004680)

With the rate speech synthesis is developing, it's probably going to be hard to distinguish between human speakers and synthetic speakers in a few years from now.

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Re:Going blind and learning to love audiobooks by gradys on Monday December 25, 2017 @11:37AM (#16004689)

See https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/ind...

And the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15962543

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Re:Going blind and learning to love audiobooks by JoshTriplett on Monday December 25, 2017 @12:55PM (#16005004)

I'm really looking forward to those actually being available to use.

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Re:Going blind and learning to love audiobooks by johansch on Monday December 25, 2017 @01:23PM (#16005129)

I've just started to use AWS Polly in some demos, but the speech synthesis quality feels 2-3 years old at least :/

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Re:Going blind and learning to love audiobooks by johansch on Monday December 25, 2017 @12:54PM (#16005000)

I think what's missing is to understand and adapt the speech rhythm and pauses based on the language. At first sight I would say that this requires human intuition, but then again, lots of literature is repetative, so I think ML could actually work quite well well, with actual understanding of the text, given enough data.

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