longform audio

[mapleroyal]

Would you consider making a feature where it can generate book-length audio instead of short sentences?

I know everyone just wants to use this to voice their AI waifus, but it may be the solution I've been looking for for a LONG time to convert ebooks to audiobooks.

As a bonus, I don't know if you're aware but there's a pretty big industry for ebook TTS apps on mobile phones. Someone could put all those apps out of business if they just turned this into a simple mobile app and included a couple high quality voices.

[yesuda]

I've been working on my own version of a GUI for piper and I'll have multi-line supported, but for something like an audiobook, wouldn't you prefer to use a bigger cloud tts like openais? https://github.com/p0n1/epub_to_audiobook

[mapleroyal]

I've been working on my own version of a GUI for piper and I'll have multi-line supported, but for something like an audiobook, wouldn't you prefer to use a bigger cloud tts like openais? https://github.com/p0n1/epub_to_audiobook

Oh ya 100% if it was free and local and I could initiate it and go off to do something else and return and it would have a completed output audio file of the full text. But I think any major corporate TTS service is none of those.

[yesuda]

The repo I linked should check off 2 of those 3 things, but I'll try adding epub pdf support to my own gui

[mapleroyal]

I may be misunderstanding you? The repo you linked appears to use non-free, non-local models…?

[yesuda]

i haven't actually used that program but im pretty sure edge-tts doesn't need an api key or anything, so it's not local but free and turns a full text into an audio file

[natlamir]

That https://github.com/p0n1/epub_to_audiobook looks very interesting. I will check that out. It sounds like it should be able to convert ebooks to audiobooks. Regarding the book-length audio instead of short sentences with Piper. I can look into making something like that as part of the UI or something else perhaps. Earlier I merged a change to allow for multiple paragraphs in the textbox.

[Ale3ex]

I really miss the ability to save large text to an audio file. I currently use Balabolka, a SAPI 5-based app, to convert text to audio files. These aren't just books, but also merged text from dozens of forum pages, Reddit comments, large articles, etc. I simply paste the text into the program window and save it to audio files, splitting it by keywords. It would be really cool to have a "Save to audio file" button, then SAPI 5 can go to the trash.

It would also be useful to split the text into multiple files based on the number of words/length of the audio or based on keywords, like in Balabolka. Keywording is useful to have separate files for each chapter of a book, Reddit topic, etc. Otherwise, we either end up with huge 10-hour files or have to split the book into multiple parts manually, paste these parts into the window, and wait for this part to save before inserting the next one.