An Audio-Book Project

What is audiobook?

According to Wikipedia:

An audiobook (or a talking book) is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. ---wikipedia.org

What is speech synthesiser?

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer used for speech synthesis is called a speech synthesizer.

the functionality of a computer software to convert a text into speech, synthesise it and speak it is called TTS.

Overview Of Text To Speech

Text Document

Spoken Version

• Limited domain synthesis.
• Full synthesis.

1 Limited Domain Speech Synthesis

This speech synthesis technique used in situations where the text to be spoken is of a limited domain. e.g. IVR systems, talking clocks and ATMs(Automatic Teller Machines), automated announcements, etc.

2 Full synthesis

This is a more generic technique of synthesising speech. Voices generated intended for this purpose use a significantly large amount of text recordings to build the voice. These voices are capable of synthesising any text of perticular language. e.g. screen readers, TTS systems

Problem Statement

Despite advancements in screen reading and text to speech technology, a significant amount of text is inaccessible to the users. Reading printed text is still a major challenge for visually impaired users.
In this first part of the work, our goal is to build a tool which could utilise all current synthesiser technology, which could process all documents, and produce high quality multilingual "mp3" audiobooks.
The Build tool could be able to process unlimited pages of PDF documents.

selection of programming language

• Python
• C#

Python Code

						import pyttsx3
						import PyPDF2

						book = open('sanchit-ghule-personal-resume.pdf', 'rb')
						pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(book)
						pages = pdfReader.numPages

						speaker = pyttsx3.init()
						for num in range(0, pages):
						    page = pdfReader.getPage(num)						
						    text = page.extractText()
						    speaker.say(text)
						    speaker.runAndWait()
					

Shortcomings with Python

1. Code is not efficient with large number of files.
2. It is taking longer to process text extraction and audio conversion.
3. Limited number of synthesisers are available in Python.
4. difficult to use in multithreading. Module doesn’t quite behave the way expected.

Need to look for alternate options.

C Sharp Source Code

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Globalization;
using System.IO;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using System.Security.Permissions;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
#if LINQ
using System.Linq;
#endif
#if TEST
using NDesk.Options;
#endif
					

Advantages of using C# Tool

1. It is very efficient.
2. executable can run on Powershell as well as WSL2.
3. Can process several thousands of books.
4. Can process all worlds languages. It will only require supporting synthesiser language.
5. Option to varying speech rate, volume of processing audio, ability to change synthesiser support and synthesiser language.
6. It can produce "mp3" audiofile as output.
7. Script can run 24/7, 365 days without overloading.

Synthesiser used