Another site, which includes a smaller but more professionally curated set of recordings, is Lit2Go (https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/books/). My children and I for example have greatly enjoyed Lorraine Montgomery’s recording of “Curly and Floppy Twistytail”, a series of delightful nonsense stories performed with gusto. (https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/183/curly-and-floppy-twistytail-t...) They’re not all aimed at children either, high quality recordings of Dracula, David Copperfield, etc
Min0taur · 8h ago
Ohhh, I never thought I'd see FCIT/lit2go mentioned on HN! I used to work in the sound booth for lit2Go, it was one of my favorite jobs. We had some wonderful vocal talent come through, and I learned much of what I know about recording/mixing from that work.The people in charge of organizing that project were diligent/earnest to the point of sainthood.
They have quite a few historic stereo-views scattered around their open source pic site, I always enjoyed browsing those with my 3d shades on:
I really appreciate the existence of this project and all people who have contributed to it.
I want to contribute a reading of a book someday in my native tongue, as it is slowly dying (less than 1k speakers). A way of preserving it.
rendall · 8h ago
What is it?
spookie · 2h ago
I fear it would be too personally identifiable lmao
It's within the EU though
WillAdams · 18h ago
One of my favourite novels, H. Beam Piper's _Little Fuzzy_ is in the public domain (because he died intestate and the Commonwealth of Pa. failed to renew his copyrights before they were turned over to his estate).
There is a professional-quality reading of it by Tabithat:
Unfortunately, the quality of the readings can vary widely, and my family has often been unwilling to put up with a poor quality recording on long trips.
That said, I use their app on my phone while doing boring tasks at work, and greatly appreciate the project.
rectangleboy · 15h ago
> Unfortunately, the quality of the readings can vary widely . . .
I tried LibriVox in college to listen to difficult-to-understand poems (at the professor's recommendation) on my iPod and my ears couldn't take the harsh plosives that nearly every recording I tried had.
WillAdams · 15h ago
There is a collection of different authors reading Coleridge's "Kublai Khan" which is a great way to get an experience of a lot of different readers and possibly find one you like.
For my part, I'm grateful that folks volunteer their time and energy, and when there is only one reader for a given text, accept it.
Der_Einzige · 15h ago
It really is the e-book version of trying to do "netflix n chill" with FOSS.
It's sad that the best tech projects are not useful to normies.
nl · 13h ago
I don't think "netflix n chill" means what you think it does.
linsomniac · 8h ago
If you're one of today's lucky 10,000: It is slang for having sex, beyond the literal meaning.
Der_Einzige · 5h ago
It means what I think it means.
Do you think a girl wants to deal with you trying to get your torrent streaming system working with your TV? Hell no!
kps · 1h ago
If she doesn't, it wouldn't have worked out anyway.
begemotz · 19h ago
"This is a libravox recording. All libravox recordings are in the public domain..."
I contributed to a Robert Lynd project on libravox many years ago, and I still remember saying these intros.
(Lynd was a wonderful essayist, if anyone might be interested).
jfengel · 18h ago
I know th books are always in the public domain. Are the recordings public domain as well, or are they under a free license like GPL?
I wonder if AI will be a benefit or a detriment to this project.
On the one hand, there’s going to be a lot more, potentially high quality audio books in its repository, on the other hand it goes against the spirit of the project itself.
woodson · 20h ago
The speech data collected by this project has been used for more than a decade to build automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis systems (see LibriSpeech, LibriTTS, LJSpeech). It definitely has been a benefit to AI.
joshstrange · 16h ago
I think they are talking more about the impact of AI on Librivox, as in people running an ebook through an AI TTS tool and uploading it.
On one hand, a well curated/edited AI recording might be great but a lot of people will (try? Idk their policies) to upload AI slop (no proof-listen, no checking, just laziness).
woodson · 14h ago
I think that, for the purposes of creating high-quality Free audiobooks, the issues are essentially the same with human-generated recordings as with AI generated ones. The recording quality and faithfulness to the original text (both in terms of “content” and the appropriate reading in terms of tone, expression of emotion, etc.) have to be verified. The problem is scale. There will be many more TTS-generated recordings uploaded than human-generated ones. Some automated filters (e.g., ASR WER, audio quality metrics) would be a great first step to discard bad-quality slop right away (though it might unfairly penalize real human accented speech).
Importantly, the recording should indicate whether it was human or AI generated.
reddit_clone · 35m ago
I get very annoyed at the AI voice overs in youtube shorts and videos (which are showing up more and more lately).
I just close the tab when I realize it is AI. Not sure how long I can do this.
username223 · 13h ago
> Importantly, the recording should indicate whether it was human or AI generated.
This is all that's necessary. Sometimes I'm fine with mediocre TTS; sometimes I want an actual professional; librivox is somewhere in between, but should clearly specify whether I will be getting an amateur human or a robot.
swores · 2h ago
I disagree, for the reasons stated by the person you replied to.
Historically, being told that a voice recording is AI generated would be enough to tell you to expect basic TTS robotic voice, but with advances in AI voice generation we're approaching the point where AI can sound as good as real humans - it's not yet to the point where it's easy to generate an audiobook as good as a professional reader, but that point will come in the not too distant future.
And equally on the other side, something being recorded by a human doesn't automatically mean it has the quality of a professionally-read audiobook. This is something LibriVox has always had to deal with, by gatekeeping which volunteer recordings to either give feedback requesting improvements to or to not use at all.
In some but not all cases, an amateur human reader can already be as good as a professional, that will soon be true for AI. For both AI and humans it will remain the case that some efforts are not as good, but the line between them (for quality) isn't going to be whether or not they are AI - though I do agree that AI or not should also be labelled.
username223 · 1h ago
Certainly TTS has improved a lot thanks to modern AI, but it simply doesn't have the information to improve beyond sounding like a human reading words fluently. A professional audiobook reader modulates his tone to reflect narrative mood, chooses voices for the characters consistent with their natures, etc., and transformer models can't do those things.
For an example of a professional audiobook, check out Rob Inglis' version of The Lord of the Rings.
swores · 7m ago
I agree with you about the current stage of things, which is why I said that we're approaching the point but not yet there for AI to be able to match professional readers.
But I disagree with you when you write "it simply doesn't have the information to improve beyond sounding like a human reading words fluently" - it has the same information when reading it as a human does, meaning that the best implementation would have to not only adapt tone to explicit instructions like "... she shouted", but also read between the lines / make subjective choices to suit the different characters.
AI is already capable of doing sentiment analysis on text, and text to speech models are getting better at being able to simulate moods/emotions rather than just speaking flatly, and I don't think we're many years away, if that, from those two sides being paired together in a way that produces the sort of quality output we're talking about for the first time without human involvement. Add to that the fact that AI can train on the many good examples of humans reading things, they may get to the point of emulating not just the core accent but also how each accent should adopt to what meanings in the text and arrive at a great solution without even needing to go through the steps of analysing what the text means to use that to know how to modify the voice being generated.
kristopolous · 12h ago
I imagine there's various disabilities where audio readings greatly simplify people's lives. They're probably appreciative of anything accurate regardless of whether it's humans talking or not.
spudlyo · 18h ago
I'd like to think that in the future this will be possible, but at present I believe there are still too many uncanny valley problems for me to regard any TTS generated audio books as high quality. I can sometimes tolerate listening to articles or technical essays done this way, but quality audio book narrators often do consistent and distinct character voices, understand complex emotional states, and are capable of reacting to contextual clues and subtext. This seems like a pretty high bar for current TTS models.
Something like NotebookLLM seems shockingly good at first, and gives me hope that eventually we'll have machines that are nearly as good as humans at this; but after listening to it for an hour or so the novelty wore off and the artifice of it now seems galling and distracting.
bookofjoe · 6h ago
>quality audio book narrators often do consistent and distinct character voices, understand complex emotional states, and are capable of reacting to contextual clues and subtext.
The best experience I've ever had with audio books is John le Carré reading his early novels (not in public domain). He uses a different voice for each character and they are SO pulsing with life it's breathtaking.
spudlyo · 4h ago
Thanks for the tip! I love well narrated audiobooks, and I've been meaning to get into one of le Carré's books for a while. I see he narrates the "John le Carré Value Collection" on Audible which has Tailor of Panama, Our Game, and Night Manager for a single credit. Is that what you're referring to?
Along those lines, there is a great 2007 unabridged audiobook[0] of Frank Herbert's Dune that is read by Simon Vance for narration, but other characters are dramatically performed by other voice actors. It's excellent, but sadly a tad bit uneven and inconsistent in production. It's like they got 3/4ths of the way through the project and some of the original voice actors couldn't complete the project and Vance had to pick up the slack. Regardless, it's still one of my favorite audiobooks.
Well, you can safely assume that everything in Librivox was used to train the AI. So, "benefit" or "detriment"... you make the call.
bArray · 4h ago
I think there needs to be a way to apply multiple filters, i.e. I want Science Fiction and to listen in English. It would be good to also be able to combine with keywords too.
dlcarrier · 20h ago
I once couldn't find the audiobook of a book that my book club was reading, and it was a long book at I didn't have time to set aside to solely reading. It turned out that there weren't any commercially produced audiobooks of it, but it was public domain, and I found it on LibriVox.
The book was long and boring, but at least the narrating was good.
I've enjoyed quite a few very well narrated audiobooks on LibriVox. The Jane Austen novels voiced by Karen Savage are phenomenal.
towledev · 19h ago
Haven't listened to Librivox in years and years, but I still fork over the annual $2.99 because I feel I owe it.
It's horizon-broadening. Lots and lots of interesting reads/listens I never would've picked up otherwise. 1800s ghost stories, darkly racist novels like The Leopard's Spots (good luck getting through the first 10 pages). My favorite is Havelock the Dane: A Tale of Old Grimsby, first written circa the 14th century but thought to be much older. When you listen to it, it is apparent that the author and the intended audience know 100x more about nautical things than you do. It's also charmingly simplistic; the main character is sort of like Conan the Barbarian. He'll do things like "lift a stone the weight of an ox and throw it the length of two men." You imagine the audience being like, "Oh my fucking god.... that's amazing."
Nopoint2 · 4h ago
Elizabeth Klett is good too.
photochemsyn · 17h ago
A real gem is the Adrian Praetzellis reading of Kim by Rudyard Kipling:
They have quite a few historic stereo-views scattered around their open source pic site, I always enjoyed browsing those with my 3d shades on:
https://etc.usf.edu/clippix/search?q=stereoview (They had more than this search would suggest; hopefully they're still around...)
I want to contribute a reading of a book someday in my native tongue, as it is slowly dying (less than 1k speakers). A way of preserving it.
It's within the EU though
There is a professional-quality reading of it by Tabithat:
https://librivox.org/little-fuzzy-by-h-beam-piper/
which I recommend highly.
Unfortunately, the quality of the readings can vary widely, and my family has often been unwilling to put up with a poor quality recording on long trips.
That said, I use their app on my phone while doing boring tasks at work, and greatly appreciate the project.
For my part, I'm grateful that folks volunteer their time and energy, and when there is only one reader for a given text, accept it.
It's sad that the best tech projects are not useful to normies.
Do you think a girl wants to deal with you trying to get your torrent streaming system working with your TV? Hell no!
I contributed to a Robert Lynd project on libravox many years ago, and I still remember saying these intros.
(Lynd was a wonderful essayist, if anyone might be interested).
https://librivox.org/pages/about-librivox/
David Clarke does a very good narration of many Sherlock Holmes stories.
this is the way.
On the one hand, there’s going to be a lot more, potentially high quality audio books in its repository, on the other hand it goes against the spirit of the project itself.
On one hand, a well curated/edited AI recording might be great but a lot of people will (try? Idk their policies) to upload AI slop (no proof-listen, no checking, just laziness).
Importantly, the recording should indicate whether it was human or AI generated.
I just close the tab when I realize it is AI. Not sure how long I can do this.
This is all that's necessary. Sometimes I'm fine with mediocre TTS; sometimes I want an actual professional; librivox is somewhere in between, but should clearly specify whether I will be getting an amateur human or a robot.
Historically, being told that a voice recording is AI generated would be enough to tell you to expect basic TTS robotic voice, but with advances in AI voice generation we're approaching the point where AI can sound as good as real humans - it's not yet to the point where it's easy to generate an audiobook as good as a professional reader, but that point will come in the not too distant future.
And equally on the other side, something being recorded by a human doesn't automatically mean it has the quality of a professionally-read audiobook. This is something LibriVox has always had to deal with, by gatekeeping which volunteer recordings to either give feedback requesting improvements to or to not use at all.
In some but not all cases, an amateur human reader can already be as good as a professional, that will soon be true for AI. For both AI and humans it will remain the case that some efforts are not as good, but the line between them (for quality) isn't going to be whether or not they are AI - though I do agree that AI or not should also be labelled.
For an example of a professional audiobook, check out Rob Inglis' version of The Lord of the Rings.
But I disagree with you when you write "it simply doesn't have the information to improve beyond sounding like a human reading words fluently" - it has the same information when reading it as a human does, meaning that the best implementation would have to not only adapt tone to explicit instructions like "... she shouted", but also read between the lines / make subjective choices to suit the different characters.
AI is already capable of doing sentiment analysis on text, and text to speech models are getting better at being able to simulate moods/emotions rather than just speaking flatly, and I don't think we're many years away, if that, from those two sides being paired together in a way that produces the sort of quality output we're talking about for the first time without human involvement. Add to that the fact that AI can train on the many good examples of humans reading things, they may get to the point of emulating not just the core accent but also how each accent should adopt to what meanings in the text and arrive at a great solution without even needing to go through the steps of analysing what the text means to use that to know how to modify the voice being generated.
Something like NotebookLLM seems shockingly good at first, and gives me hope that eventually we'll have machines that are nearly as good as humans at this; but after listening to it for an hour or so the novelty wore off and the artifice of it now seems galling and distracting.
The best experience I've ever had with audio books is John le Carré reading his early novels (not in public domain). He uses a different voice for each character and they are SO pulsing with life it's breathtaking.
Along those lines, there is a great 2007 unabridged audiobook[0] of Frank Herbert's Dune that is read by Simon Vance for narration, but other characters are dramatically performed by other voice actors. It's excellent, but sadly a tad bit uneven and inconsistent in production. It's like they got 3/4ths of the way through the project and some of the original voice actors couldn't complete the project and Vance had to pick up the slack. Regardless, it's still one of my favorite audiobooks.
[0]: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781427201447-dune
"Call For The Dead" and "A Small Town in Germany"
Listen here:
https://youtu.be/e1lmpG3kCDg
https://youtu.be/30QOqAcY4bY
https://youtu.be/0Ik9Gv9s0TQ
https://youtu.be/q79SspzdpLA
https://youtu.be/i3UnPBMouwU
FWIW The three novels in the "Value Collection" are abridged:
https://www.amazon.com/John-le-Carr-Value-Collection-audiobo...
The book was long and boring, but at least the narrating was good.
It's horizon-broadening. Lots and lots of interesting reads/listens I never would've picked up otherwise. 1800s ghost stories, darkly racist novels like The Leopard's Spots (good luck getting through the first 10 pages). My favorite is Havelock the Dane: A Tale of Old Grimsby, first written circa the 14th century but thought to be much older. When you listen to it, it is apparent that the author and the intended audience know 100x more about nautical things than you do. It's also charmingly simplistic; the main character is sort of like Conan the Barbarian. He'll do things like "lift a stone the weight of an ox and throw it the length of two men." You imagine the audience being like, "Oh my fucking god.... that's amazing."
https://librivox.org/kim-by-rudyard-kipling/
Sure, Eleven Labs isn't anywhere near as good as professional narration (yet), but it's better than your average Librivox reader for sure.
At this point, it's just a matter of throwing money at the problem (and not that much money at that), and that's usually easier than finding talent.