Apple has been granted a patent for “Generating Genre Appropriate Voices for Audio Books” for its Books app.
You can listen to audiobooks on your Mac using the Apple Books app. Open the Books app, navigate to the “Audiobooks” section, and select the book you want to listen to. The audiobook player will appear, allowing you to control playback, change playback speed, and set a sleep timer.
About the patent
Audio books provide a beneficial and enjoyable way for users to enjoy written content in a different form, often while performing other tasks such as walking or driving. However, generating audio books can be an expensive and time intensive process requiring a reader to read the book and record their voice, Apple says in the patent.
What’s more, the process of finding the correct reader for each audio book can also take a significant amount of time and effort on the part of the author or publisher of the book. Apple’s patent is designed to provide methods that offer “efficient ways of automatically generating realistic voices for audio books is desired to provide a way to create audio books from text.”
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “Systems and processes for generating audio books from text are provided. An example process includes, at an electronic device having one or more processors and memory: receiving a text including at least a first subset and a second subset, wherein at least a portion of the first subset overlaps with at least a portion of the second subset; determining, based on the text, a prosody for a speech output, wherein the prosody is representative of a genre; determining a semantic meaning of the text; and generating, based on the prosody and the semantic meaning, the speech output of the text.”
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