When you use text to speech everything is a free audiobook. Unless, of course, the book itself is in a locked down DRM format where you can't access the text.
I really like google text to speech and use it for my own custom audiobooks, I've tried google's microsoft's, IBM's, and a few other research ones. IBM's sounds slightly better but has a much more restricted free monthly tier, google's and microsoft's has 1 million free characters per month which goes pretty far.
Like others are saying, it's slightly robotic but I've started to listen a ton by TTS and you definitely get used to it (you even start to hear inflection in it, which is cool). I use android smart audiobook app and you can control the sound levels, turning down the high pitch aspects also helps to make it easier to listen to for longer periods of time
For HN folks, there are some pretty reasonable research projects, especially by nvidia (glownet) which you can run yourself. They sound relatively similar but the training voices are much more restricted and not as good. If anyone knows of a github/etc with a nicer diy TTS I'd be interested. The best I've seen which is customizable is https://github.com/espnet/espnet but I had trouble getting it to work, then getting it to sound ok
(For anyone else going DIY I'll warn you that the failure modes for TTS is some unerring frankly creepy sounds. Google's TTS fails very well, even for strange words, and when it gets very confused it spells it out. Some of the research ones go into haunting unrelated syllables, sometimes repeating for 10s of seconds
Can you suggest any high quality, free text to speech software? As an avid audiobook consumer, if the book is not available in audio, I won't read it, but there are some books that I'd like to read anyway.
