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Here's a video of my Emotive Audiobook Creator, KeenLore, a locally hosted web app:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAeHgE94rVo
No cloud, no tokens to pay. Reads a book using a full cast of characters. Quotation attribution detection (for my novel) is at 97.2% accuracy (485/499 quotes identified and assigned correctly). The autofill of character voice descriptions uses the prose to determine how the character sounds.
Employs Gemma 4[1] for the prose analysis (voice fills, quotation detection) and Qwen3 TTS Voice Design[2] for creating voice samples. Runs on an 8GB NVIDIA T1000 GPU card, 96 GB RAM, and a AMD Ryzen 5 7600.
[1]: https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/
[2]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-Voice-Design
<grumble grumble people putting in links they expect you to follow to arbitrary goatse youtube videos for all I know>
The title of the video is 'KeenLore - Emotive Audiobook Creator Demo' and it appears to be a web UI and some local stack that reads text files.
Their first sentence literally tells you it's a video of their app? It's not a mystery-meat link.
It's cool technology and I read a lot of audiobooks, even hundreds of hours of TTS. I feel like my brain can fill in the character voices from the text - on the page it's not like they're different fonts.
I understand audiobook narrators often do it, and that's fun. But it's not so critical in my opinion
Our imaginations and minds continue to rot under the weight of endless and effortless entertainment
I guess voice cloning is widely enough available now from other providers that Google are no longer hesitant to ship it.
They probably do something similar to GPT-Live where they expect a given voice profile to send them a sample saying 'This is the owner of this voice and I consent for synthetic samples to be made of it'
and/or local voice cloning is good enough as is so Google doesn't grant a uniquely liable ability?
Probably the latter. Cat's already out of the bag to the extent that you can synthesize with a specific voice in one go and it sounds decent. Even if you need commercial models for better intonation or whatever, you can probably get the commercial models to first generate with a generic voice, then use a local model to transfer that to voice you're cloning. That'll probably get rid of any C2PA watermarks too.
"Don't be evil... unless other companies are doing it first"
voice cloning is a tool, it is not necessarily evil, even though the scenarios it can be used for nefarious purposes outnumber the legitimate ones.
is the legit ones just like... putting carrie fisher in star wars?
usually people bring up anyone who is losing physical control of their voice faculties, so they can have a synthetic voice that matches their natural voice
As an example of this, Sarah Langs uses a synthesized voice due to the progression of her ALS symptoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Langs
The iPhone has a built in voice cloner hidden in the accessibility settings for exactly this use-case: creating a backup of your voice in case you need it in the future.
I mean yeah? If google offers a cloud nmap tool, should everyone get in a tizzy about how google is "evil", even though it saves baddies maybe 5 minutes of work?
Google granted themselves the authority be evil back in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
Gemini 3.8 "Flash" says hello
"Super tinny monotone robotic voice" does not sound neither tinny nor monotone. Compared to what TTS from 90s sounded like. Or even how actors impersonated robots in movies. Has the model been eating too much hype DJs?
None of these examples are really what the prompt asked for. It's just like image models, once you get over how unbelievable it is that a computer produced this you realize the result isn't actually what you want.
I direct my own extended daydream Star Trek fanfic (okay, I'm on season 2 episode 17) and recently I looked to see if I could have each scene file be read aloud a la an audiobook or radio drama.
Getting GPT-Live to have unique enough voices and to be expressive with how I imagine the voices going in my head is hard to direct, there's not enough control there.
So this Gemini 3.8 specific large voice library and ability to tightly control (if you are willing to write a script) is nice to find, and while I'm not sure which of the 5,286 Gemini products this is, nor how to onboard and get started feeding this my own text files, nor what training will happen to my data if I did somehow use it, I love that the state of the industry is such that Google can do this and release it publicly, because that means eventually an equivalent product can come from someone else and be used locally / confidently that the generated audio or inputs won't be retained and misused.
Original series or Next Generation?
Please don't say Nu Trek.
Lower decks obviously
You might find this interesting, it seems to be exactly what you need to make an audio drama: https://github.com/Finrandojin/alexandria-audiobook
Also the Qwen3-TTS demo is cool, you can describe the voice you want: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS
I came across both on this subreddit, it's very active: https://www.reddit.com/r/TextToSpeech/
I'm personally using this locally: https://github.com/mateogon/pdf-narrator (it's a Python frontend for Kokoro) on my M1 Macbook Air (from 2020, with 8GB RAM) and it's incredible. I make my own audiobooks now - for free!
My favorite voice is am_michael and here's a sample: https://voicerankings.com/voice/kokoro-82M/male/am_michael/s...
Great. Now in additional to AI email responses I will get AIs impersonating my contacts on the phone too. Lovely.
Sorry if this is in that article, but I am on my phone and can't see it. How much would this cost to batch generate an audiobook? Right now I just listen to things in the 11 labs app which is free, but I would rather just generate audio files.
Roughly 5-10$ for 10h, assuming you few-shot it.
Price per hour:
- 3.8 Flash TTS, standard: $0.81
- 3.8 Flash TTS, batch: $0.41
- 3.8 Flash‑Lite TTS, standard: $0.54
- 3.8 Flash‑Lite TTS, batch: $0.27
That is the biggest difference here for me. I have not looked at every solution, but many. They are either much more expensive or garbage quality. For example my next target audiobook is a monster 250k words, 1.5m characters, so about $15 here or $75 using elevenlabs (0.05 per 1k characters). For me that is the difference between I will or I won't use it.
Would be great if this would power the Google Books app feature. The voice system there is pretty out of date.
Yes, I am quite disappointed by seeing all this cool AI stuff and yet the same Play Books. Come on, it is the best place to apply AI, in my opinion.
the ratio of new voice models i see on hackernews to the number actually deployed in any product i use is approximately infinity.
I’ve never found a TYS that does convincing British accents.
They all sound like Americans putting in their best fake British accent.
Related, for embedding small models, this lib is incredible.
Having a voice under 1Mo is crazy, even if it sounds robotic.
https://tts.ampixa.com/sanoTTS/
Great price at least until December 31 too.
Seems like voice actors are safe for now. This is technologically incredible, but the results are really not very good, and usually not particularly close to the prompt. In basically all of these examples some core part of the prompt is completely ignored.
Um, what?
Technologically incredible as in "I cannot believe it's possible for a computer to do this" and not very good as in "these examples are not what was prompted and I can't think of a use case where these would be acceptable".
Imagine someone showing you that they've trained their dog to hold a paintbrush and paint. There would be no contradiction between "this is incredible" and "these paintings suck".
It's giving me an error when I try to generate a voice with Voice Design in AI Studio. It also says voice replication isn't available in my region.
Also weird that there are no "neutral gender" voices in the English language. There's also limited "use cases," like the "Gaming" use case is empty?
And there's no pricing listed anywhere.
I don't know, I guess their roll out is a bit sloppy. It's a bit of a shame, though, since the voices which are available all sound like generic Gemini voices to me. Nothing stands out is being particularly interesting or impressive about this.
"users must provide a verbal consent recording from the voice owner that matches the reference speaker before a voice can be created"
How long is this stored? What could go wrong? :P
Does it detect synthesized consent recordings?
Still sounds AI, you can tell they exaggerate all the tone and trailing "high scoring expressive sounds" like your job depends on it.
My primary use case for TTS is converting written content (blogs, articles, etc.) in to clips I can listen to on the go.
Is there a good browser extension that does this with a flexible TTS backend? I know Qwen, Kokoro, and VibeVoice all have decent quality..
If you use Chrome on Android, there is a "Listen to this page" option in the menu.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14768725?hl=en
Based on this video I think this model was trained on p*rn
https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...
It’s just a woman’s voice…
That argument says as much about the training as it says about your sexuality, you do realize that right.
you can't use this model if it randomly moans between phrases
Either you have posted link to a wrong video or we have a very different experience when it comes to moaning.
Onomatopoeia? Sure it is there, and some fillers (or whatever you call those little sounds). But moans?
It would be nice to have sound effect generation (use case: games)
Couldn't see this in the article, does it support API calls for one-shot conversation type responses like ElevenLabs offers?
$0.50 per hour pricing could last a long time with back and forth conversation use.
They keep announcing new 3.8 variants. I wonder why they still haven't updated 3.1 Pro yet.
Pricing isn't noted.
I vibe coded a playground UI for trying this out. The conversation mode is neat, and it's very expensive - most of my experiments have cost less than a cent.
https://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-tts-playground#compos...
Very expensive?
here is a competitor, if someone wants to compare https://gradium.ai/
I've been trying to track the SOTA for years switching between wavenet on Gcloud, to Azure, to ElevenLabs, and now Fish.audio. This is damn good