I'm working on a product where you can select a book, and a voice you want and I'd read out the book summary or review in that voice. Imagine Barack Obama or Morgan Freeman reading your favorite bedtime stories!<p>My questions are<p>1. I'm unsure about how to make it a good and useful product. What are some of the usecases? I can summarize blogs, books, etc, but what else?<p>2. What are the copyright implications here? Can I just take someone's voice and use it?
You’ll likely run into ‘likeness’ issues if you use actual celebrities’ voices, especially considering that it would cut into their own book sales. I imagine many authors have self-narrated their own audiobooks and don’t want others to undercut it.<p>I think this might be better suited for public domain books from the past. If I could have <i>The Count of Monte Cristo</i> read by a Frenchman (in English), or <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> read by a British man with a Victorian accent, that would be cool.<p>Also another idea: audio versions of movie scripts. Select a character type for each role in the story, then automatically generate an audio version of the entire thing.
I would find that very distracting, unless it was someone with a good narrator voice, like Morgan Freeman.<p>I know this because my suspension of disbelief gets somewhat broken when I recognize the voice actor in an animated feature. I imagine it would be similar with characters in a book.
Instead of trying to use the voice of a specific individual (living or dead) it would be legally safer to offer a choice of character types. Crusty sea dog, cultured Victorian English, mid-west rural tramp, Hollywood want-to-be, etc.