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.<p>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.<p>I hope it helps you as well!<p>Cheers
Cool app!
I've had some issues with getting it to work, though:<p>- ebook-convert is not a small dependency, it seems that it only comes bundled with calibre software. And calibre has huge number of python dependencies (>400 packages on OpenSuse) - don't know about you, but I'm not polluting my install with that for a small tool. So, I've grabbed appimage version of calibre, extracted it and added symlink to the bundled ebook-convert. It is still around ~500mb of wasted space, but atleast it's local to a single folder.<p>Could you replace it with another tool/library, or include only necessary stuff with binary?<p>- Then I've encountered another problem. I have no piper installed on my system, but readme says:<p>> You don't need to have piper installed. This program manages piper and the associated models.<p>It didn't download piper release and proceeded without errors. Then it <i>did</i> download some models. After that it errored out on trying to change directory to non-existent "~/.config/QuickPiperAudiobook/piper"
So naturally, I looked in source code, found link to piper tarball and extracted it myself.<p>A-ha! Now it works. Until..<p>- Done. Saved audiobook as /home/archargelod/Audiobooks/text.wav<p>You could try to guess what was the problem, but I'm going tell you right away: it didn't create "Audiobooks" folder and again there were no errors.<p>Thankfully, that was the last issue and after I created ~/Audiobooks manually, my generated wav was there.
That's interesting, thanks for sharing. Does anyone know of a good solution for seamlessly switching between audiobooks and ebooks for books that are not bought from Amazon on Kindle?<p>In this case you already have the input file, and the audio output file but I guess there would be an app that takes these two files to provide a good reading experience. As they are based on the same source it should be possible to keep the reading progress matched between them.
I’ve really enjoyed moving most of my reading to TTS-generated audiobooks. I haven’t tried the newer AI voices but that certainly sounds like a step up!
As a former audiobook narrator, may your cereal always be soggy and your socks too.<p>On a more serious note, this is a cool application of the technological advancement in AI voice models, and inevitable in today's society. It just really sucks to watch this race to the bottom actively put people out of work.<p>But hey, at least we can save a few bucks on an audiobook, right?
Tangentially related: I like to leave my phone at home when I go exercise, and just listen to books via my watch (21st century problems...)<p>But to this date I cannot use Apple's Books app on the watch to listen to audiobooks I have on mp3/mp4a/... It only works with audiobooks you have purchased in their walled garden.
Is Piper currently the best open source TTS model? I occasionally review open models to see if they match elevenlabs and have been disappointed. However, Piper sounds better than the last time I listened around.
Very interesting. I have listened to an AI audiobook once and although the inflection was somewhat jarring at first you got kinda used to it. I suppose it's good enough for your own use. And audiobook prices being what they are rather affordable one as well.
A very cool project, you should build a website interface you could easily charge for it or take donations/advertise on it if you want to keep it free<p>What would it take to add a specific language to piper? And do you know a good speech to text model?
This is awesome, it was pretty easy to set up and start using it.<p>I have just one question/note to make: I tried a book in the Mexican Spanish language and noticed that it fails to catch the accents on the words (emphasis on words with tildes and strong accents on that syllable) and I am thinking it is because of the .pdf parsing since the Piper Voice Sample on their webpage example does it properly (on both avbailable voices).<p>Do you have an idea of what could exactly be happening and how I can try to solve it?<p>Thank you very much for the tool again!!!<p>Update: Ohh ok I just checked the repo Issues and found the one about polish accents, I tried "--speak-diacritics" but got the same "Error: failed to read file passed as input to piper: read /tmp/ebook-convert-xxxxxxx.txt file already closed". If I skip the diacritics option it converts fine.