Just wanted to come in and comment that this might be my favorite mod for skyrim, I've been playing for years but I've always just kinda skimmed the books but this has made me actively look for them and walk around so i can listen to all these great stories I'd been neglecting for years, ty so much for the effort you put into this! <3 <3
Love your mod! I have been using it for quite some time now and only recently found a book that made me laugh because it was so cute. The book was, "Ulfr's Book". Nice job, thank you!
i wonder if this could be updated to use AI generated voices instead, as some of the voices in this mod weren't done very well because of bad mic's and such.
there could also be a wider range of voices used using something like eleven labs tts. there was another modder who used the Oblivion guard NPC voice for a FO4 mod and it sounded so damn good, i couldn't really tell it was AI voiced because that's how good it sounds these days.
some words it did have difficuly reading the text or pernouncing some words, but for the most part it was on par with a normal sounding human voice.
xVAsynth is what people use to generate voices for mods and such. I dont know much about it but i use a Geralt(witcher) voicepack and DBVO, some guy added voices for over 100 mods and im learning so i can do my mod list. ill come back to this if I ever figure it out
i'm pretty sure he used eleven labs tts to make the garalt voice mod, xVAsynth doesn't sound nearly as good. it has gotten better after a few years, but it doesn't sound nearly as good, but it's free and that's why people use it instead of eleven labs which is like $5 a month to use, there are some other free tts programs, but again the quality is significantly worse with the free ones.
Screw that. Generative AI voicework is unethical, as it is stealing the voices of the original voice actors and using it in a way they don't consent to. How would you feel if suddenly there's a machine that could make you say anything anyone wanted? Several voice actors for Skyrim have spoken out and asked people not to use AI to synthesize their voices.
The people who worked on this mod worked tirelessly to record lines for each book. Wanting to replace all that hard work with a soulless AI is an insult, no matter how crappy you think the mic quality is.
no, it would cost maybe $5 for a month of use, but it's best to be prepared which voice you want and all the text nice and ready for the book words before you head there so you can get it done within that month of using the service, actually it would take far less than a day if prepared with the right material, but they charge by the month, so maybe if you had a crap load of projects you could get them all done within that month and really use the service to your advantage.
it's honestly no different than using this program https://readloud.net/english/american/2-girl-s-voice-sally.html this is free and the voices don't sound nearly as good, but that's why it's free. try it out for free, take anyone's long sentence work and just copy and paste it within the program and hit voice it, and the program will turn it into a audio file and suddenly it will all be voiced and in less than a minute your done with using the program, it's literally that easy to use.
Your response comes across as somewhat self-righteous. While it's clear you have reservations about AI-generated content, it's essential to recognize that your perspective may not be universally shared. Many individuals don't harbor the same level of concern or disdain for AI-generated materials.
so i have learned a little more about Eleven labs text to speech, it's actually not generative AI, they only use AI to learn voice patterns and tone, the program itself isn't actually AI, it's just a text to speech program that was refined using AI.
i understand other people won't agree with this, because for some reason it's perfectly ethical to splice direct audio copies of dialogue of NPC's in the game to create mods with, but text to speech program that used AI to learn voice patterns and tone is a no no for some reason, which is not even a direct copy of the voice actor, the spliced audio they used is way more unethical because that's a direct copy of the voice files where as the text to speech files are generated based off of tone and voice patterns.
btw, xVAsynth uses the same protocol, it just doesn't have the pattern recognition software to make the voices sound more realistic, that's really the only difference.
I agree this would be much better if we had a consistent level of quality using AI voices, I'd love to hear Tolfdir read me books, or what if you could have whatever followers voice you had at the moment perform it? It would require generating them all for every voice though, but would still be a read neat immersive addition.
that would be a great idea, but i think we should only refer to it as text to speech at this point, because to many people see AI and automatically assume like blowing a dog whistle that it's bad because they have little knowledge on the whole subject and they claim it's worse when it's done by these programs over using direct spliced audio.
236 comments
i got that feeling a update is coming.
E;dit: i have a idea maybe add a few book series. Such as Book of Enoch. hmmm i wonder if anyone tried a quest line mode sourronding that.
It's basically an audio player integrated into the game.
some words it did have difficuly reading the text or pernouncing some words, but for the most part it was on par with a normal sounding human voice.
The people who worked on this mod worked tirelessly to record lines for each book. Wanting to replace all that hard work with a soulless AI is an insult, no matter how crappy you think the mic quality is.
it's honestly no different than using this program https://readloud.net/english/american/2-girl-s-voice-sally.html
this is free and the voices don't sound nearly as good, but that's why it's free. try it out for free, take anyone's long sentence work and just copy and paste it within the program and hit voice it, and the program will turn it into a audio file and suddenly it will all be voiced and in less than a minute your done with using the program, it's literally that easy to use.
i understand other people won't agree with this, because for some reason it's perfectly ethical to splice direct audio copies of dialogue of NPC's in the game to create mods with, but text to speech program that used AI to learn voice patterns and tone is a no no for some reason, which is not even a direct copy of the voice actor, the spliced audio they used is way more unethical because that's a direct copy of the voice files where as the text to speech files are generated based off of tone and voice patterns.
btw, xVAsynth uses the same protocol, it just doesn't have the pattern recognition software to make the voices sound more realistic, that's really the only difference.