santinic/audiblez

Audiblez generates .m4b audiobooks from regular .epub e-books, using Kokoro's high-quality speech synthesis.

Kokoro-82M is a recently published text-to-speech model with just 82M params and very natural sounding output. It's released under Apache licence and it was trained on < 100 hours of audio. It currently supports these languages: 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇮🇳 🇮🇹 🇯🇵 🇧🇷 🇨🇳

On a Google Colab's T4 GPU via Cuda, it takes about 5 minutes to convert "Animal's Farm" by Orwell (which is about 160,000 characters) to audiobook, at a rate of about 600 characters per second.

On my M2 MacBook Pro, on CPU, it takes about 1 hour, at a rate of about 60 characters per second.

If you have Python 3 on your computer, you can install it with pip. You also need espeak-ng and ffmpeg installed on your machine:

Then you can convert an .epub directly with:

It will first create a bunch of book_chapter_1.wav, book_chapter_2.wav, etc. files in the same directory, and at the end it will produce a book.m4b file with the whole book you can listen with VLC or any audiobook player. It will only produce the .m4b file if you have ffmpeg installed on your machine.