7 KiB
Audiblez: Generate audiobooks from e-books
v4 Now with Graphical interface, CUDA support, and many languages!
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.
How to install and run
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:
sudo apt install ffmpeg espeak-ng python-wxgtk3.0-dev # on Ubuntu/Debian 🐧
pip install audiblez
brew install ffmpeg espeak-ng # on Mac 🍏
pip install audiblez
Then, to run the graphical interface, just type:
audiblez-ui
If you prefer the command-line instead, you can convert an .epub directly with:
audiblez book.epub -v af_sky
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.
Speed
By default the audio is generated using a normal speed, but you can make it up to twice slower or faster by specifying a speed argument between 0.5 to 2.0:
audiblez book.epub -v af_sky -s 1.5
Supported Voices
Use -v option to specify the voice to use. Available voices are listed here.
The first letter is the language code and the second is the gender of the speaker e.g. im_nicola is an italian male voice.
| Language | Voices |
|---|---|
| 🇺🇸 | af_alloy, af_aoede, af_bella, af_heart, af_jessica, af_kore, af_nicole, af_nova, af_river, af_sarah, af_sky, am_adam, am_echo, am_eric, am_fenrir, am_liam, am_michael, am_onyx, am_puck, am_santa |
| 🇬🇧 | bf_alice, bf_emma, bf_isabella, bf_lily, bm_daniel, bm_fable, bm_george, bm_lewis |
| 🇪🇸 | ef_dora, em_alex, em_santa |
| 🇫🇷 | ff_siwis |
| 🇮🇳 | hf_alpha, hf_beta, hm_omega, hm_psi |
| 🇮🇹 | if_sara, im_nicola |
| 🇯🇵 | jf_alpha, jf_gongitsune, jf_nezumi, jf_tebukuro, jm_kumo |
| 🇧🇷 | pf_dora, pm_alex, pm_santa |
| 🇨🇳 | zf_xiaobei, zf_xiaoni, zf_xiaoxiao, zf_xiaoyi, zm_yunjian, zm_yunxi, zm_yunxia, zm_yunyang |
How to run on GPU
By default, audiblez runs on CPU. If you pass the option --cuda it will try to use the Cuda device via Torch.
Check out this example: Audiblez running on a Google Colab Notebook with Cuda .
We don't currently support Apple Silicon, as there is not yet a Kokoro implementation in MLX. As soon as it will be available, we will support it.
Manually pick chapters to convert
Sometimes you want to manually select which chapters/sections in the e-book to read out loud.
To do so, you can use --pick to interactively choose the chapters to convert (without running the GUI).
Help page
For all the options available, you can check the help page audiblez --help:
usage: audiblez [-h] [-v VOICE] [-p] [-s SPEED] [-c] [-o FOLDER] epub_file_path
positional arguments:
epub_file_path Path to the epub file
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-v VOICE, --voice VOICE
Choose narrating voice: a, b, e, f, h, i, j, p, z
-p, --pick Interactively select which chapters to read in the audiobook
-s SPEED, --speed SPEED
Set speed from 0.5 to 2.0
-c, --cuda Use GPU via Cuda in Torch if available
-o FOLDER, --output FOLDER
Output folder for the audiobook and temporary files
example:
audiblez book.epub -l en-us -v af_sky
to use the GUI, run:
audiblez-ui
Author
by Claudio Santini in 2025, distributed under MIT licence.