Paper · arXiv 2309.03926
Large-Scale Automatic Audiobook Creation
Brendan Walsh, Mark Hamilton, Greg Newby, Xi Wang, Serena Ruan, Sheng Zhao, Lei He, Shaofei Zhang, Eric Dettinger, William T. Freeman, Markus Weimer
A system leverages neural text-to-speech to automatically generate high-quality, customizable audiobooks from e-books, significantly expanding access to literature.
Abstract
An audiobook can dramatically improve a work of literature's accessibility and improve reader engagement. However, audiobooks can take hundreds of hours of human effort to create, edit, and publish. In this work, we present a system that can automatically generate high-quality audiobooks from online e-books. In particular, we leverage recent advances in neural text-to-speech to create and release thousands of human-quality, open-license audiobooks from the Project Gutenberg e-book collection. Our method can identify the proper subset of e-book content to read for a wide collection of diversely structured books and can operate on hundreds of books in parallel. Our system allows users to customize an audiobook's speaking speed and style, emotional intonation, and can even match a desired voice using a small amount of sample audio. This work contributed over five thousand open-license audiobooks and an interactive demo that allows users to quickly create their own customized audiobooks. To listen to the audiobook collection visit https://aka.ms/audiobook.