HACKER Q&A
📣 alphagrep12345

Would you like your favourite celebrity read a book to you?


I'm working on a product where you can select a book, and a voice you want and I'd read out the book summary or review in that voice. Imagine Barack Obama or Morgan Freeman reading your favorite bedtime stories!

My questions are

1. I'm unsure about how to make it a good and useful product. What are some of the usecases? I can summarize blogs, books, etc, but what else?

2. What are the copyright implications here? Can I just take someone's voice and use it?

  👤 keiferski Accepted Answer ✓
You’ll likely run into ‘likeness’ issues if you use actual celebrities’ voices, especially considering that it would cut into their own book sales. I imagine many authors have self-narrated their own audiobooks and don’t want others to undercut it.

I think this might be better suited for public domain books from the past. If I could have The Count of Monte Cristo read by a Frenchman (in English), or Sherlock Holmes read by a British man with a Victorian accent, that would be cool.

Also another idea: audio versions of movie scripts. Select a character type for each role in the story, then automatically generate an audio version of the entire thing.

👤 karmakaze
I would find that very distracting, unless it was someone with a good narrator voice, like Morgan Freeman.

I know this because my suspension of disbelief gets somewhat broken when I recognize the voice actor in an animated feature. I imagine it would be similar with characters in a book.

👤 helph67
Instead of trying to use the voice of a specific individual (living or dead) it would be legally safer to offer a choice of character types. Crusty sea dog, cultured Victorian English, mid-west rural tramp, Hollywood want-to-be, etc.