Yet another Hacker News

79 points swolpers 1 hour ago 41 comments

thangalin 52 minutes ago | parent

Here's a video of my Emotive Audiobook Creator, KeenLore, a locally hosted web app:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAeHgE94rVo

No cloud, no tokens to pay. Reads a book using a full cast of characters. Quotation attribution detection (for my novel) is at 97.2% accuracy (485/499 quotes identified and assigned correctly). The autofill of character voice descriptions uses the prose to determine how the character sounds.

Employs Gemma 4[1] for the prose analysis (voice fills, quotation detection) and Qwen3 TTS Voice Design[2] for creating voice samples. Runs on an 8GB NVIDIA T1000 GPU card, 96 GB RAM, and a AMD Ryzen 5 7600.

[1]: https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/

[2]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-Voice-Design

Multicomp 50 minutes ago | parent

The title of the video is 'KeenLore - Emotive Audiobook Creator Demo' and it appears to be a web UI and some local stack that reads text files.

loremm 46 minutes ago | parent

It's cool technology and I read a lot of audiobooks, even hundreds of hours of TTS. I feel like my brain can fill in the character voices from the text - on the page it's not like they're different fonts.

I understand audiobook narrators often do it, and that's fun. But it's not so critical in my opinion

talon8635 44 minutes ago | parent

Our imaginations and minds continue to rot under the weight of endless and effortless entertainment

simonw 51 minutes ago | parent

> Voice replication: Recreate consistent vocal profiles from just a 30-second audio sample of your voice or a voice you have the rights to use, backed by built-in consent verification, SynthID watermarking, and C2PA credentials to protect both developers and their vocal talent.

I guess voice cloning is widely enough available now from other providers that Google are no longer hesitant to ship it.

Multicomp 49 minutes ago | parent

They probably do something similar to GPT-Live where they expect a given voice profile to send them a sample saying 'This is the owner of this voice and I consent for synthetic samples to be made of it'

and/or local voice cloning is good enough as is so Google doesn't grant a uniquely liable ability?

miltonlost 35 minutes ago | parent

"Don't be evil... unless other companies are doing it first"

imjonse 22 minutes ago | parent

voice cloning is a tool, it is not necessarily evil, even though the scenarios it can be used for nefarious purposes outnumber the legitimate ones.

bakies 11 minutes ago | parent

is the legit ones just like... putting carrie fisher in star wars?

gegtik 1 minute ago | parent

usually people bring up anyone who is losing physical control of their voice faculties, so they can have a synthetic voice that matches their natural voice

perrohunter 48 minutes ago | parent

Gemini 3.8 "Flash" says hello

112233 47 minutes ago | parent

"Super tinny monotone robotic voice" does not sound neither tinny nor monotone. Compared to what TTS from 90s sounded like. Or even how actors impersonated robots in movies. Has the model been eating too much hype DJs?

burkaman 16 minutes ago | parent

None of these examples are really what the prompt asked for. It's just like image models, once you get over how unbelievable it is that a computer produced this you realize the result isn't actually what you want.

Multicomp 46 minutes ago | parent

I direct my own extended daydream Star Trek fanfic (okay, I'm on season 2 episode 17) and recently I looked to see if I could have each scene file be read aloud a la an audiobook or radio drama.

Getting GPT-Live to have unique enough voices and to be expressive with how I imagine the voices going in my head is hard to direct, there's not enough control there.

So this Gemini 3.8 specific large voice library and ability to tightly control (if you are willing to write a script) is nice to find, and while I'm not sure which of the 5,286 Gemini products this is, nor how to onboard and get started feeding this my own text files, nor what training will happen to my data if I did somehow use it, I love that the state of the industry is such that Google can do this and release it publicly, because that means eventually an equivalent product can come from someone else and be used locally / confidently that the generated audio or inputs won't be retained and misused.

ghostbrainalpha 32 minutes ago | parent

Original series or Next Generation?

exhilaration 23 minutes ago | parent

You might find this interesting, it seems to be exactly what you need to make an audio drama: https://github.com/Finrandojin/alexandria-audiobook

Also the Qwen3-TTS demo is cool, you can describe the voice you want: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS

I came across both on this subreddit, it's very active: https://www.reddit.com/r/TextToSpeech/

I'm personally using this locally: https://github.com/mateogon/pdf-narrator (it's a Python frontend for Kokoro) on my M1 Macbook Air (from 2020, with 8GB RAM) and it's incredible. I make my own audiobooks now - for free!

My favorite voice is am_michael and here's a sample: https://voicerankings.com/voice/kokoro-82M/male/am_michael/s...

talon8635 45 minutes ago | parent

Great. Now in additional to AI email responses I will get AIs impersonating my contacts on the phone too. Lovely.

sgc 42 minutes ago | parent

Sorry if this is in that article, but I am on my phone and can't see it. How much would this cost to batch generate an audiobook? Right now I just listen to things in the 11 labs app which is free, but I would rather just generate audio files.

thevinter 39 minutes ago | parent

Roughly 5-10$ for 10h, assuming you few-shot it.

Price per hour:

- 3.8 Flash TTS, standard: $0.81

- 3.8 Flash TTS, batch: $0.41

- 3.8 Flash‑Lite TTS, standard: $0.54

- 3.8 Flash‑Lite TTS, batch: $0.27

xnx 38 minutes ago | parent

Would be great if this would power the Google Books app feature. The voice system there is pretty out of date.

mamudo 32 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I am quite disappointed by seeing all this cool AI stuff and yet the same Play Books. Come on, it is the best place to apply AI, in my opinion.

laweijfmvo 31 minutes ago | parent

the ratio of new voice models i see on hackernews to the number actually deployed in any product i use is approximately infinity.

andrewstuart 36 minutes ago | parent

I’ve never found a TYS that does convincing British accents.

They all sound like Americans putting in their best fake British accent.

maelito 31 minutes ago | parent

Related, for embedding small models, this lib is incredible.

Having a voice under 1Mo is crazy, even if it sounds robotic.

https://tts.ampixa.com/sanoTTS/

drewbitt 26 minutes ago | parent

Great price at least until December 31 too.

burkaman 22 minutes ago | parent

Seems like voice actors are safe for now. This is technologically incredible, but the results are really not very good, and usually not particularly close to the prompt. In basically all of these examples some core part of the prompt is completely ignored.

avazhi 13 minutes ago | parent

> Seems like voice actors are safe for now. This is technologically incredible, but the results are really not very good,

Um, what?

nater5000 17 minutes ago | parent

It's giving me an error when I try to generate a voice with Voice Design in AI Studio. It also says voice replication isn't available in my region.

Also weird that there are no "neutral gender" voices in the English language. There's also limited "use cases," like the "Gaming" use case is empty?

And there's no pricing listed anywhere.

I don't know, I guess their roll out is a bit sloppy. It's a bit of a shame, though, since the voices which are available all sound like generic Gemini voices to me. Nothing stands out is being particularly interesting or impressive about this.

accountrequired 17 minutes ago | parent

"users must provide a verbal consent recording from the voice owner that matches the reference speaker before a voice can be created"

How long is this stored? What could go wrong? :P

m3kw9 14 minutes ago | parent

Still sounds AI, you can tell they exaggerate all the tone and trailing "high scoring expressive sounds" like your job depends on it.

seemaze 13 minutes ago | parent

My primary use case for TTS is converting written content (blogs, articles, etc.) in to clips I can listen to on the go.

Is there a good browser extension that does this with a flexible TTS backend? I know Qwen, Kokoro, and VibeVoice all have decent quality..

kyrra 11 minutes ago | parent

If you use Chrome on Android, there is a "Listen to this page" option in the menu.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14768725?hl=en

xmorse 12 minutes ago | parent

Based on this video I think this model was trained on p*rn

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...

droidjj 10 minutes ago | parent

It’s just a woman’s voice…

hmokiguess 10 minutes ago | parent

That argument says as much about the training as it says about your sexuality, you do realize that right.

xmorse 7 minutes ago | parent

you can't use this model if it randomly moans between phrases

fullstackwife 12 minutes ago | parent

It would be nice to have sound effect generation (use case: games)

nitroedge 7 minutes ago | parent

Couldn't see this in the article, does it support API calls for one-shot conversation type responses like ElevenLabs offers?

$0.50 per hour pricing could last a long time with back and forth conversation use.