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Hi All! Happy Easter! An idea has been percolating in my mind of late, and I wanted to see if there is anyone else out there who has had one similar...Has anyone ever thought of taking some of the more complete (finished) stories in here and record them for visually impaired readers? Perhaps they aren't visually impaired...but slow readers or those who struggle with reading in general. I wouldn't have a clue what would be needed - other than someone with a good reading voice and able to interject tonal and vocal inflections within the story. I would bet that there are those out there who could benefit from such a feature to big closet? Comments?
Anon Allsop
Comments
Recording Books
I "think" that if they were put on Kindle or something similar, there is a feature that produces voice?
Gwen
I actually did this
For a reader who was unable to read her favorite TG suthors. I did a cassette tape of some of her favorite stories and got a nice note back from her wife. It made it all worthwhile.
I would record on CD now.
Commentator
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Audio stories
Ignoring the possible double entendres associated with the abbreviation CD, a compact disc is too limited. You have described a digital audio file, that can be stored on a variety of media and even streamed.
Good idea
I love listening to audiobooks while driving and have had this same thought about how nice it would be to hear these stories "live". Of course the big detractors are the voices we already have in our heads for some characters; same as what happens when movies are based on a book.
I have heard of the text to speech feature but don't know anything about it; my mind jumps to the disconnected sounds of "The number you have called - six-zero-five-eight-three..." but perhaps the software is better than that. I'm interested.
>>> Kay
think
Think Hawking but more inflection but little emotion but it keeps improving at an amazing rate. have a good day and enjoy life.
Have a good day and enjoy life.
Audio Book Productions
This is actually something we (at Doppler.Press) have been wanting to do for a while, but we need to find reliable voice talent that is willing to work/record on the promise of commissions at this point as we don't have enough capitol to pay up front while we are still building things up. If anyone knows of anyone that has a good voice performance, and wants to help BigCloset, please let us know.
Good radio voice
I'm told I have a good radio voice. I'm retired and would have plenty of time to work on it. I'm not sure about what kind of equipment would be needed to record it in a compatible format. As for renumeration... we could work something out. The only caveat(s) is that I would reserve the right to refuse assignments on the basis of content. Also that time frame be left up to my discretion, as in no deadlines.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Audio books are now quite a
Audio books are now quite a significant portion of the book trade. I have listened to literally hundreds of them. From my experience the Stephen Fry reading of the Harry Potter series is the pinnacle of a quality production. Using the text to speech converter is a tad too monotonous. While effective for vision impaired to read some documents it is not that enjoyable for books.
A good reading voice should have a good frequency range, too much base and it is easily drowned out by background noise, eg. car engine. Keep the dynamic range (volume) relatively steady, allow emotion but do not resort to whisper or shout. There is no need to produce a wide range of voices. Change of cadence and rhythm of speech is usually sufficient, no need to oscillate between a soprano and a base.
Avoid adding any background music or other background sounds, it only makes concentration on the words harder.
Most PCs are quite capable of recording in MP3 and/or AAC. These are compressed formats and audio books, especially those produced at home, can be done with a highly compressed format (e.g. 64kbps) which means that the file sizes are small and easy to download or email (for reviews etc). The only other requirement is a quiet room and some patience.
Upcoming Technology
I know some others have mentioned some of the options for computer generated being too mono-tone, but I believe in the next three years that may very well go by the wayside. Google just updated their text-to-speech platform https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ with some new features. The Wavenet-F voice seems promising. It's not there yet, but it does manage some inflection changes based on punctuation usage - pretty impressive to me! This technology seems to have kind of stalled in the mid-2000's, but with Siri and Google Home/Android fighting for the marketplace I think it's going to inspire a lot of innovation in the near future. Definitely would be an option to allow the anonymity that most of us value.