Large-Scale Automatic Audiobook Creation
Brendan Walsh Mark Hamilton Greg Newby Xi Wang Serena Ruan Sheng Zhao Lei He Shaofei Zhang Eric Dettinger William T. Freeman Markus Weimer
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 human-quality, open-license audiobooks from the Project
Gutenberg e-book 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 \url{https://aka.ms/audiobook}.