Another challenge with audiobooks is that they can take hundreds of hours to create, edit, and publish. Working with Microsoft AI, Project Gutenberg was able to cut that time dramatically by automatically producing high-quality audiobooks from existing online e-books. "In particular, we leverage recent advances in neural text-to-speech to create and release thousands of human-quality, open-license audiobooks from the Project Gutenberg e-book collection," a team of people from Project Gutenberg and Microsoft said in a paper about the project. "Our method can identify the proper subset of e-book content to read for a wide collection of diversely structured books and can operate on hundreds of books in parallel," the team explained. "This work contributed over five thousand open-license audiobooks and an interactive demo that allows users to quickly create their own customized audiobooks."
