
Ask HN: Would you like your favourite celebrity read a book to you? - alphagrep12345
I&#x27;m working on a product where you can select a book, and a voice you want and I&#x27;d read out the book summary or review in that voice. Imagine Barack Obama or Morgan Freeman reading your favorite bedtime stories!<p>My questions are<p>1. I&#x27;m unsure about how to make it a good and useful product. What are some of the usecases? I can summarize blogs, books, etc, but what else?<p>2. What are the copyright implications here? Can I just take someone&#x27;s voice and use it?
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keiferski
You’ll likely run into ‘likeness’ issues if you use actual celebrities’
voices, especially considering that it would cut into their own book sales. I
imagine many authors have self-narrated their own audiobooks and don’t want
others to undercut it.

I think this might be better suited for public domain books from the past. If
I could have _The Count of Monte Cristo_ read by a Frenchman (in English), or
_Sherlock Holmes_ read by a British man with a Victorian accent, that would be
cool.

Also another idea: audio versions of movie scripts. Select a character type
for each role in the story, then automatically generate an audio version of
the entire thing.

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alphagrep12345
Audio versions of scripts sound good. I'll look into this :)

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karmakaze
I would find that very distracting, unless it was someone with a good narrator
voice, like Morgan Freeman.

I know this because my suspension of disbelief gets somewhat broken when I
recognize the voice actor in an animated feature. I imagine it would be
similar with characters in a book.

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helph67
Instead of trying to use the voice of a specific individual (living or dead)
it would be legally safer to offer a choice of character types. Crusty sea
dog, cultured Victorian English, mid-west rural tramp, Hollywood want-to-be,
etc.

