Audio Script Record

The podcast discusses accessing free audiobooks through text-to-speech technology. It compares samples of audiobooks generated by basic computer programs from the 1990s, modern text-to-speech methods, and recordings by human actors like Liam Neeson and Richard Burton. The text-to-speech technology has evolved to sound more human-like by understanding pacing, tone, and emotion cues. The comparison highlights the different qualities and emotions conveyed by various narration methods. Hello, welcome to today's podcast. In this episode of the podcast, I'll be telling you about how you can access thousands of hours of audiobooks for free, and we'll be exploring text-to-speech along the way. Now let me take you back to a time where AI wasn't available to everyone like it is now. What we'd use in the 1980s and the 1990s is a basic program on a computer to convert text-to-speech, and I'm going to play you an example of when you try to listen to a book, making it an audiobook using this method. When you're using the basic program for text-to-speech, it sounds exactly like this. You just heard the opening chapter of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, written between 1895 and 1897, and that was read by your basic text-to-speech computer service from the 1990s. Things have moved on slightly since then, and now this is how text-to-speech sounds from the very same chapter of War of the Worlds using today's text-to-speech method. That clip was from 2023, and it was part of the Microsoft Project and a partnership with the Gutenberg Project in order to give copyright-free books available to all of those who wanted to listen to them and wanted to read them. So essentially, free audiobooks for all with books out of copyright, and what they did was they made as many books available through services like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and all narrated by AI text-to-speech, and that's how they sounded. Microsoft say that AI is trained to understand cues for pacing, tone, and emotion to make the narration more human-like. It can also differentiate between speakers and apply distinct voices. So that's pretty listenable. I imagine you'll agree with me on that, but there's an alternative, and that's using human actors. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take you back a few years and have a famous Hollywood actor read the first pages for me and see what you think of that and compare it to the first two. You may have recognized that voice. That was Liam Neeson in April 2012, narrating the War of the Worlds, and I'm sure you'll agree with me that has a very different feel to the other two examples. I'm not saying the other two don't have their place, but getting a human actor to narrate it has a different quality. So that was 2012. Let's take you back to 1978, and this is a different version, a different actor, a very famous actor of the time, and let's see if you think this was one of the best so far, or not your cup of tea. This is Richard Burton narrating War of the Worlds. Richard Burton there, what do you think? I hope today I've managed to show you how different versions of the same text... Richard Burton there, what do you think? I hope today I've managed to show you how different versions of the same text... and when I say different versions of the text, I mean read in different ways, conjured up emotions, a different vibe, and a different feel. I just don't understand how different versions of the same text...