Same. Feel uneasy having audio books on Audible or Apple Books. They have the power to remove them or block your account at anytime and the books are no longer in your possession. Highly unlikely ofc.

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that is interesting! can you describe how that transcription process works? if i have an audiobook and the corresponding ebook/pdf, isn't that already trasncribed? or does transcription here mean something else?

i'd also be happy to use an existing dataset (the english one from keith ito sounds pleasant enough) but i am confused how to use it to read a book. there is code for a model that learns to synthesize speech from the data: https://github.com/keithito/tacotron but i don't see how to get at the end result which i think should also be available somewhere so i can just use it to read something.