
Show HN: Auditus – Ebook to Audiobook Conversion - Immortalin
https://auditus.cc
======
visarga
I like your project, but I'd like it more if it was accompanied by a video of
the text being highlighted as it is being read (a kind of dual modality
reading - visual + audio). I created such a tool for myself on MacOS with the
Alex voice, that works in browsers on any page and in PDFs. I find dual
modality reading to enhance my focus a lot. Btw, I use this tool to read this
very thread of comments.

And of course I would want to hear the amazing Wavenet voices used in this
role.

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nafizh
Do you plan to share yours? Looks very interesting from the dual modality. I
would definitely try it out.

~~~
visarga
It's only for personal use, but if you want to try:

[https://gist.github.com/Visarga/e6597edcb7ec6993521829ef5c17...](https://gist.github.com/Visarga/e6597edcb7ec6993521829ef5c1798db)

Also, it only works on MacOS because it uses the Alex voice which comes
bundled with the system.

~~~
chairmankaga
That's really cool, thanks for sharing!

I saw a site that highlighted the official audiobook/ebook of "The Lean
Startup" on one page. I love this as a generic solution.

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firefoxd
I have the habit of convert everything I write into audio first before I
publish it. It's a good way to make your mistakes pop out.

I use fromtexttospeech[1] to convert to audio. Judging by the voices, it seems
like the author is also using the same speech engine.

If I'm not mistaken, these are from Nextup's TextAloud software.

[1]:[http://www.fromtexttospeech.com](http://www.fromtexttospeech.com)

Edit: Though this beats the 50k character limit

~~~
Immortalin
AWS Polly

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dsr_
It occurs to me that the mistakes in emphasis that I hear in these samples are
the same mistakes I hear from young readers who are concentrating on decoding
the words one at a time. The method that fluent text speakers use is to
process the entire sentence while beginning to speak it.

I wonder if a better model of word emphasis considering whole sentences could
move an automated reader out of the uncanny valley.

~~~
Immortalin
Currently the text is run through a sentence segmented before conversion

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danthelion
Hey, I just created a similar application using the Cloud Text-To-Speech API
from Google and the textract
([https://textract.readthedocs.io](https://textract.readthedocs.io)) library
to extract text from lots of kinds of documents:

[https://github.com/danthelion/doc2audiobook](https://github.com/danthelion/doc2audiobook)

It runs inside a Docker container so fairly easy to try it out.

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Immortalin
Hi! I built this to have an easier way to convert ebooks to audiobooks! The
backend is powered by AWS Polly. If you have any feedback or feature requests,
please feel free to drop me an email at <last 3 characters of username> @
<myusername>.com

~~~
gh02t
This is great! I forwarded this to my girlfriend (who is blind) and she loves
it.

~~~
llao
On Android there is
[http://www.hyperionics.com/atVoice/](http://www.hyperionics.com/atVoice/)
which I really like and which seems on a similar level (at least judging by
the example).

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laex
I built something similar to listen to Paul Graham's essays It's a console app
& uses OSX's "say" command for the TTS. Contributions are welcome.
[https://github.com/hemantasapkota/awesome-
essays](https://github.com/hemantasapkota/awesome-essays)

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lewi
I get a metamask (ETH Wallet) phishing warning on this site. Anyone else
experience this?

~~~
aik
Interesting. The MetaMask phishing detector keeps a blacklist of URLs/domains
and compares a site's domain against it using the levenshtein distance
algorithm. So it could be a false positive. After a quick check I didn't find
Auditus on there:

[https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-
detect/blob/master/...](https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-
detect/blob/master/src/config.json)

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dangoor
This is cool and I figured we'd be heading down this path soon enough. A lot
of the best audiobooks I've listened to were narrated by people that can do
multiple voices well. I was thinking that being able to produce an audiobook
that uses different voices for different characters would be great. Something
like Narrator:

[http://marinersoftware.com/products/narrator/](http://marinersoftware.com/products/narrator/)

Narrator, though, uses Mac OS text to speech, which is nowhere near the level
of Polly or Google Cloud Speech.

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deepakb358
There are a few IOS apps that do this in real time. The best one by far is
'Voice Dream' and they use the same voices. It is basically and audiobook in
your pocket anytime, anywhere for any text file and shows the words as it is
reading back, start/stop/pause, adjust speed, change voice, etc etc. All
around awesome. When the new google voices or equivalent make it to IOS, it
will be almost human-like.

~~~
gnicholas
This is a good example of a tool that was created for the accessibility
community (vision impaired, dyslexic) and has subsequently been adopted by
mainstream readers.

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asveikau
As a language nerd I would like to praise naming the project after a Latin
past participle.

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eejdoowad
It's really cool to see the applications made possible by the high quality,
reasonably priced, and fairly licensed text-to-speech APIs offered by AWS,
Azure, and Google Cloud.

The most fleshed out service of this type that I've found is narro.co, which
offers web/pdf/epub/video/rss/email/text to audio conversions.

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ehudla
What are the best practices for doing the reverse: taking audio and producing
text? I don't mind the translation to be rough, the error rate can be quite
high for my purposes, but I want the process not to get stuck and recover so
it processes a full length talk.

~~~
Immortalin
From my experiments generating subtitles from TV/movie audiotrack, 75% (worst
case) to 95% (best case). If you model it as a standard distribution,
somewhere around 85-90% accuracy. Most services provide much better accuracy
for stuff like calls or conferences with proper microphones and minimal
background noise than for things like TV shows and movies. If the input audio
is noisy, I would do some noise filtering before piping it into conversion.

~~~
ehudla
Which conversion tools/services do you have in mind?

~~~
Immortalin
Google and Azure

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fipple
As an easier problem, what I’d find useful is a way to keep a pirated
audiobook and pirated e-book in sync, the way that Amazon does with
WhisperSync. A single app where I upload the .epub and the mp3s and it keeps
me in sync when I read in either format.

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bunchjesse
You can also do this in iBooks with any of the built-in voices available on
iOS.

Just turn on Speak Screen in Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Speech
and then swipe down with two fingers while reading your book. It'll even turn
the page for you.

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lighttower
This is awesome. But doesn't Amazon bill you for usage? What's keeping you
afloat?

~~~
Immortalin
Each conversion costs a couple dollars depending on length - cheaper than most
audiobooks at the expense of human realism. You can listen to a sample of a
human read version of accelerando:
[https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/accelerando/210129](https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/accelerando/210129)

The one generated by auditus is too smooth, slightly unnatural

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Immortalin
Here's a human narrated sample for comparison:
[https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/accelerando/210129](https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/accelerando/210129)

~~~
rahimnathwani
That link returns a 404 for me.

~~~
Immortalin
Try again?

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planb
I usually do this by hand with surprisingly good results: I use calibre to
convert the ePub to txt and then fix some common problems (i.e. remove line
breaks and page numbers) using regular expressions. Then I convert it to an
audio file using the macOS Automator text-to-speech action (be sure to
download the high quality voices first).

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Immortalin
Update: Server's overloaded right now. Any conversion that has not been sent
will be delivered by end of tomorrow.

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k4ch0w
Love the idea about the project. I tried to upload a Epub and got an error
page. I tried 3 times and different voices. I look forward to seeing more of
it and think it's an awesome idea.

~~~
Immortalin
Send me the epub and I will convert it for free! Thanks for catching the bug,
will look into it soon. Edit: Was the epub in English?

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thisisit
This doesn't seem to be working. I have tried uploading a sample epub. After
the epub is uploaded it sends me to a _conversions_ page. That page is just a
copy of the homepage.

~~~
Immortalin
Also, you need to select the file type on the left, currently epub is the only
option but PDF support is planned soon.

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CNJ7654
Part of me would actually really enjoy having the option to use an old school
voice generator. Imagine a horror novel narrated by MS Sam

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iamjeff
Really neat solution.

Is this in any way based on Amazon Polly?

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hugozap
Looks like its down. I get a "The page you were looking for cannot be served."
error.

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archaeopteryx
Metamask warns me that this site is on the Ethereum phishing list...

