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Show HN: Dia, an open-weights TTS model for generating realistic dialogue

(github.com)
652 points toebee | 1 comments | 21 Apr 25 17:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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Versipelle ◴[21 Apr 25 18:27 UTC] No.43754941[source]▶
This is really impressive; we're getting close to a dream of mine: the ability to generate proper audiobooks from EPUBs. Not just a robotic single voice for everything, but different, consistent voices for each protagonist, with the LLM analyzing the text to guess which voice to use and add an appropriate tone, much like a voice actor would do.

I've tried "EPUB to audiobook" tools, but they are really miles behind what a real narrator accomplishes and make the audiobook impossible to engage with

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azinman2 ◴[21 Apr 25 20:16 UTC] No.43755991[source]▶
Wouldn’t it be more desirable to hear an actual human on an audiobook? Ideally the author?
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satvikpendem ◴[22 Apr 25 06:50 UTC] No.43759650[source]▶
Why a human? There are many cases where I like a book but dislike the audiobook speaker, so I essentially can't listen to that book anymore. With a machine, I can tweak the voice to my heart's content.
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iamsaitam ◴[22 Apr 25 07:47 UTC] No.43759961[source]▶
And get a completely wrong/bland but custom read of the book. Reading is much more than simply transforming text to audio.
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1. satvikpendem ◴[22 Apr 25 13:41 UTC] No.43762071[source]▶
Sometimes, I don't care if it's bland, I just want to listen to the text. There are a lot of Asian light novels for example which never get English audiobooks, and I've listened to many of them with basic TTS, not even an AI model TTS like these more recent ones, and I thoroughly enjoyed these books even still.