Thousands of free and open audiobooks powered by Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT
Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. This project aims to make literature more accessible to (audio)book-lovers everywhere and democratize access to high quality audiobooks. Whether you are learning to read, looking for inclusive reading technology, or about to head out on a long drive, we hope you enjoy this audiobook collection.
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The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon
I guess you need to fast-forward the table of contents… as it’s reading all the page-numbers…
And to be honest: It’s not apportierte for poetry! Is it?
What is your opinion? Let us know in the comments below…
Paper
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 humanquality, open-license audiobooks from the Project Gutenberg ebook 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.
