With synthetic voice and bots becoming more prevalent, it won’t be long before audiobooks made with synthetic voice become increasingly popular. It’s all thanks to text to speech (TTS), a technology that turns written texts into audio content that can be streamed or downloaded.
With the improvement in TTS, synthetic voice has become less robotic and more human-like. As such, more and more people are bound to warm up to the idea of creating audiobooks with this technology.
The result will be a decreasing cost for audiobooks and an increasingly enjoyable experience for the listeners.
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Creating Audiobooks with Text to Speech
Using TTS for audiobooks has many benefits.
For instance, it saves you the time and expense of hiring a narrator. In addition, the TTS narrated audiobook has almost perfect diction and no background noise.
Besides, it’s not very difficult to create an audiobook with TTS. You can do it yourself using a text to speech generator if you keep the following considerations in mind:
Choose the Right Narrating Voice
The narrating voice makes a lot of impact on a story. Therefore, you should carefully choose a voice that resonates with the personality of your book.
To give more life to your story, try giving vocal characterization to your characters. This means that you should create a voice that matches your character’s age, nature, mood, and psychology.
SSML tags can help you with your vocal characterization. It gives you different tonalities and gradients from an artificial voice. By altering the tone and timbre, you can also create other characters from the same voice.
Once you’ve finalized the voices for your characters, you can start generating audio content from your text.
Adjust the Pronunciation
The diction of a synthetic narrator can sound too mechanical and unnatural. This can be remedied by giving a rhythm to the narration through manual breaks.
For example, you can manually add pauses ranging from milliseconds to a few seconds. Introducing a breath occasionally is another way of making the dictation more natural.
You can also emphasize certain words and vary volumes to amplify any exclamations.
Regulate the Speed
The reading speed matters a lot in an audiobook. Too slow, the audience will lose interest, and too fast, the narration would be hard to follow.
Fortunately, you can change the setting to your preferred speed. Go for a pace that gives the reader enough time to fully understand the narration.
Once everything seems fine, you can download the audiobook in the format of your choice.
Limitations of Using Text to Speech to Create Audiobooks
The process of creating an audiobook with text-to-speech technology is not entirely automatic.
Manual intervention is required to optimize the narration with SSML and create a good-quality audiobook. This might take some time and effort.
Also, synthetic voices are not available in all languages. Hopefully, with further improvement in the technology, we’ll be able to overcome the limitations in the future.
Final Words
Despite some limitations, a text-to-speech generator simplifies the process of creating audiobooks to a great extent.
On the brighter side, it gives you complete control of the process and the power to make as many edits as you require.
As such, it can prove to be a cost-effective way of creating audiobooks without losing the quality of the narration.
