QuickPiperAudiobook

Awesome work! Often times in the TTS space, human-similarity is given way too much emphasis at the expense of hurting user access. Frankly as long as a voice is clear and you listen to it for a while, the brain filters out most quirks you would perceive on the first pass. Hence why many blind folks still are perfectly fine using espeak-ng. The other properties like speed of generation and size make it worth it. I've been using a custom AI audiobook generation program [0] with piper for quite a while now and am very excited to look at integrating kitten. Historically piper has been the only good option for a free CPU-only local model so I am super happy to see more competition in the space. Easy installation is a big deal, since piper historically has had issues with that. (Hence why I had to add auto installation support in [0]) [0] https

I am learning Mandarin but found that I often want a free, offline, and fast way to hear the pronunciation of Chinese characters I don't know, regardless of what app I am in. • I was surprised this didn't yet exist on Linux so I created https://github.com/C-Loftus/Mandarin-Clipboard-Speaker • It uses the same free, offline Piper models as my audiobook generator which previously gained some popularity here: https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook The solution at the moment is quite simple but I wanted to share in case it would help others or there are other cool Mandarin learning tools you know of!

Fantastic work. My dream would be to use this for a browser audiobook generator for epubs. I made a cli audiobook generator with Piper [0] that got some traction and I wanted to port it to the browser, but there were too many issues. [1] Is there source anywhere? Seems the assets/ folder is bundled js. In my opinion, there's a ton of opportunity for private, progressive web apps with this while WebGPU is still relatively newly implemented. Would love to collaborate in some way if others are also interested in this [0] https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/ [1] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/issues/352

QuickPiperAudiobook locally generates an mp3 audiobook on Linux with one easy command. It can convert PDFs, epub, mobi, and many more by using ebook-convert. It uses any piper TTS model, and thus supports a wide variety of languages. I've had great success using it to read more while reducing eye strain and computer usage. I think I've probably read 30 or so books this way now over the past year. Being able to listen to any content you want in audio form free and offline while going for a walk is extremely handy. I hope it helps you as well! Cheers

Synthesized voices are legitimately a great way to read more and give your eyes a break. I personally prefer just converting a page or book to an audiobook myself locally. The new piper TTS models are easy to run locally and work very well. I made a simple CLI application and some other folks here liked it so figured I post it. https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook

Sorry, apparently draft releases are private. I didn't realize that. Added an auto release. Here it is: https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/tag...

I could not find anything at the on the releases page (https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/) This is what I see: https://imgur.com/screenshot-PqmyqhT Do I need a GitHub account to see the draft releases?

Yes I do have prebuilt rolling releases. Since they are categorized as draft releases, GitHub hides them by default, but they are there and should work fine: https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/releases/ Examples of Piper generally can be found at https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ , and I added my program can be found at https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook/tree/master/... I added this info in the readme for you and anyone else that could benefit from it.

I personally love using Piper to make audiobooks offline. I made a CLI wrapper over it and it works great for me [0] Honestly surprised more people aren't using similar offline tools. I have listened to dozens of audiobooks in the past year through this. There is a pitfall in thinking that the most natural voice is the most important metric (i.e. many blind users still prefer espeak). Piper has a great balance of natural voice, offline convenience/privacy, and interpretability at high speeds. Still have not seen anything better as an overall audiobook solution. https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook