Yet another Hacker News

128 points swolpers 2 hours ago 66 comments

thangalin 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

Jordan-117 49 minutes ago | parent

Their first sentence literally tells you it's a video of their app? It's not a mystery-meat link.

loremm 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

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

simonw 1 hour 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 1 hour 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?

gruez 59 minutes ago | parent

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

Probably the latter. Cat's already out of the bag to the extent that you can synthesize with a specific voice in one go and it sounds decent. Even if you need commercial models for better intonation or whatever, you can probably get the commercial models to first generate with a generic voice, then use a local model to transfer that to voice you're cloning. That'll probably get rid of any C2PA watermarks too.

miltonlost 1 hour ago | parent

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

imjonse 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

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

gegtik 1 hour 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

jolan 57 minutes ago | parent

As an example of this, Sarah Langs uses a synthesized voice due to the progression of her ALS symptoms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Langs

simonw 52 minutes ago | parent

The iPhone has a built in voice cloner hidden in the accessibility settings for exactly this use-case: creating a backup of your voice in case you need it in the future.

gruez 56 minutes ago | parent

I mean yeah? If google offers a cloud nmap tool, should everyone get in a tizzy about how google is "evil", even though it saves baddies maybe 5 minutes of work?

kmoser 55 minutes ago | parent

Google granted themselves the authority be evil back in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

kingstnap 25 minutes ago | parent

Yesterday night I was doing a project with QwenTTS 1.7B.

After some debugging, making a clean dataset with clean recordings, and experimenting with a good fine tune recipe (much props to the new GPT models yesterday being cheaper).

I was able to make a robo-me that sounds absurdly good, family was shocked, all in a matter of a few hours.

So yeah the cat is out of the bag for sure.

perrohunter 1 hour ago | parent

Gemini 3.8 "Flash" says hello

112233 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

Original series or Next Generation?

hungryhobbit 1 hour ago | parent

Please don't say Nu Trek.

k12sosse 1 hour ago | parent

Lower decks obviously

exhilaration 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

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

sgc 1 hour 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 1 hour 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

sgc 38 minutes ago | parent

That is the biggest difference here for me. I have not looked at every solution, but many. They are either much more expensive or garbage quality. For example my next target audiobook is a monster 250k words, 1.5m characters, so about $15 here or $75 using elevenlabs (0.05 per 1k characters). For me that is the difference between I will or I won't use it.

xnx 1 hour ago | parent

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

mamudo 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

Great price at least until December 31 too.

burkaman 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

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

Um, what?

burkaman 1 hour ago | parent

Technologically incredible as in "I cannot believe it's possible for a computer to do this" and not very good as in "these examples are not what was prompted and I can't think of a use case where these would be acceptable".

Imagine someone showing you that they've trained their dog to hold a paintbrush and paint. There would be no contradiction between "this is incredible" and "these paintings suck".

nater5000 1 hour 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 1 hour 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

kmoser 54 minutes ago | parent

Does it detect synthesized consent recordings?

m3kw9 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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

janalsncm 35 minutes ago | parent

For on the go, I’ve been using ElevenReader. Technically not free but their free tier has been plenty for me.

unglaublich 27 minutes ago | parent

I vibed a wikipodcast app that has a wikipedia dump, gemma llm for search and summarization and a tts model for audio gen so I could just ask about topics while on the go, and the app would just go off and tell me stuff out of the Wikipedia database.

It was especially nice during a bike trip along the Rhine, I listened to a lot of the history of the industrial area and its cities.

xmorse 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

It’s just a woman’s voice…

hmokiguess 1 hour ago | parent

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

xmorse 1 hour ago | parent

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

konart 38 minutes ago | parent

Either you have posted link to a wrong video or we have a very different experience when it comes to moaning.

Onomatopoeia? Sure it is there, and some fillers (or whatever you call those little sounds). But moans?

barrell 28 minutes ago | parent

The first <sigh> does sound a lot like a moan. OP linked to the timestamp so I missed it when it first played. I was also confused but on second playback I heard the first <sigh> and also thought wtf.

I would not want that in my product.

fullstackwife 1 hour ago | parent

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

nitroedge 1 hour 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.

cainxinth 55 minutes ago | parent

They keep announcing new 3.8 variants. I wonder why they still haven't updated 3.1 Pro yet.

OutOfHere 55 minutes ago | parent

Pricing isn't noted.

simonw 53 minutes ago | parent

I vibe coded a playground UI for trying this out. The conversation mode is neat, and it's very expensive - most of my experiments have cost less than a cent.

https://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-tts-playground#compos...

iAMkenough 50 minutes ago | parent

Very expensive?

dadoum 49 minutes ago | parent

here is a competitor, if someone wants to compare https://gradium.ai/

LarsDu88 43 minutes ago | parent

I've been trying to track the SOTA for years switching between wavenet on Gcloud, to Azure, to ElevenLabs, and now Fish.audio. This is damn good

dainiusse 24 minutes ago | parent

Where is "pro"?

Thaxll 20 minutes ago | parent

What is the best open model / tool for text to speech running locally?

x3haloed 18 minutes ago | parent

I love PocketTTS. It's stupid fast and the voice quality is decent. But it's not the highest quality.

freedomben 17 minutes ago | parent

I've been making audiobooks out of text files that I have lying around, and kokoro TTS has been phenomenal