Producing Audiobooks Using Artificial Intelligence: beta mode. Louis Shalako.

She can be trained...

Louis Shalako

A few notes on producing audiobooks, narrated by AI, on Google Play.

This feature is free while it’s in beta mode. I was uploading my new novel, A Stranger In Paris, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #9.

It took three winters to write that thing, and I won’t say I was in a hurry—

As soon as I signed into the website, I saw the big blue button. Create an auto-narrated audiobook, click here.

Hmn. Interesting, I thought—

We will check that out later.

It clicked in after a while that they might be charging money for that, as soon as it goes into regular mode.

With 150 titles on Google Play, full-length novels, novellas, collections, short stories, this represents something of an opportunity. And early adopters often reap the greatest benefit from new technologies.

***

You have to read around in there, you sort of have to experiment. And yet, this is my book—but you have to take some risks. The ebooks are well formatted. The POD interiors are good, although I have yet to crack the code in terms of getting a cover uploaded on Lulu (dot) com, for example.

Okay, so your cover should be square, (not a regular portrait shot) and on the first couple of uploads, I went to the trouble of modifying the original ebook cover. Yet in the trouble-shooting phase, I read that Google Play will ‘letterbox’ your original image. Why make it square when you can just use the original marketing image. (Downloaded in full size from Smashwords. - ed.)

Also.

(If you’re just starting off and you have a small number of titles, you may want to do the work, but also, keep on going in the same manner. – ed.)

He’s right. Consistency is good. #Louis

***

Front matter. This tends to be repetitive, with a title page, a copyright page, your name in there twice or three times over two pages and a small number of words. I’m trimming that down to the minimum, also the author needs a unique ISBN number for each additional format, for every single product. You can get them from Collections Canada ISBN service, free to any Canadian citizen.

Okay. My book has chapters, my shorter works have scenes, acts, or whatever. In an Epub ebook, in order to get maximum distribution through a platform like Smashwords, you need internal navigation. You have a Table of Contents, which is in text, followed by a bunch of links to individual chapters. All of this is simply ignored. The links disappear, but you have to delete Table of Contents, which is merely text. Creating a credible audiobook, even with the help of the tool of AI, turns out to take some effort after all…you have to listen to every word. An audiobook can go six hours of listening time, and fixing things drags that out even longer. In my case, it would have been smarter to start with the absolutely shortest stories on the list.

***

Okay, so front matter, and end matter, that can be deleted or rewritten. For example, my bio also has a link to my blog. The bio remains, in the audiobook interface on Google Play Partner Centre, but the link is gone, what remains > Louis Shalako < (exactly as it appears. – ed.) remains. Again, this should be removed.

I should go back and check and see if the machine says ‘The End’ at the end of the book…

***

Editing. As for editing the actual text. "Hmn." will render as H-M-N, heh-heh-heh suffers a similar fate. Hyphenated words, for the most part, have a funny cadence and so now I'm taking out hyphens, one at a time...Chapters are deleted, so I put the cursor on the first line of text and bump that down, go back up, type in Chapter One, etc., then the machine will read it properly. You can adjust speed, you can pick voices, which are kind of limited in English. There are several other supported languages, and this is when it becomes all the more impressive, in terms of automation and AI.

So, having learned this much, it seems one should go back and review the first few audiobooks I have produced. That being said, the Google Play AI reads the text fairly well. The learning curve, as always, is fairly steep in the early stages.

I've tried changing the pronunciation of my name, which is not good. I have been unsuccessful.

I’ve learned a hell of a lot in the last two weeks, one could safely say. The machine has its limitations, but then so do I. So do we all.

Louis will crack the code.

#experimental

I had one book that just would not go yesterday, I tried again today and it still won’t go. I have no idea of what is wrong, and yet I am reluctant to chat with Google. Yet I’ve uploaded a dozen, converted them, and hopefully they are relatively good products.

The Bio.

It seems like you can update your bio, yet it’s not immediately evident on your first pass. I’ve published, and seen the product go live, and yet I seem to have skipped past the part where you select a genre, and put in the author’s bio.

You can’t get the book to go live without setting a price, yet you can mess around on the page for some time. A book should go live within 24 hours, my typical experience is ten or fifeen minutes at most.

Analysis.

Okay, so in beta mode, staff are working to perfect the thing and I’m working to perfect my thing. They must be learning a lot as well, and as long as it’s free, why not jam up as many titles as possible while the going is good. I can always go back later and fix things, I routinely do quality control and yet that is one big project for another day.

The full (hyphen) length books would be labour intensive, to say the least.

In a recent comment on Facebook, someone called AI ‘plagiarism software’. I cannot plagiarize myself. I own all copyright on products created using the tools otherwise known as AI.

AI would have been trained on the same open-source resources you and I also have access to, namely books, news sources, encyclopedias, as well as large spoken-word sources of a similar nature. They train it, (you and I train it), using music, and pictures and video and any number of other sources.

In that sense, it is ‘learning’, or being trained, and who knows where all of that is going to go. As for myself, I figure I can defeat any system by using its own rules against it.

I will try and stay ahead of it.

END

 

Formatting A Stranger In Paris (ebook).

Experimental: Artificial Intelligence.

 

Poor old Louis has books, stories and yes, ladies and gentlemen, audiobooks on Google Play.

 

See his works on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Speak Softly My Love, Chapter Two.

Louis Shalako


Speak Softly My Love


Chapter Two

Sergeant Girard and the two gendarmes went in front, lights poking ahead and off to right and left.

Gilles was at the Sergeant’s heels. His hand was in his pocket, secure in the feel of the little MAB Model D, a 7.65 mm automatic. His instinct was that it wouldn’t be needed. It was just there for moral support.

They strode into the darkness, following his route in from the sidewalk as well as Gilles could recall. 

The park was fairly large, and at the time he had been seeking the silence, the air—the smell of wet grass and dead leaves and the precious topsoil, the lifeblood of the nation as their late president had once called it in the fatuous, pompous way that politicians had.

He reached up and grabbed a shoulder. Girard was slightly taller and much heavier than Gilles. The warmth and the animal male-sweat smell was reassuring. Any self-respecting killer would have been long since gone by now, but Gilles was entertaining the notion that he might actually have surprised them in the act—either shortly after the act of murder, or perhaps right in the middle of the act of disposing of the body. He hadn’t seen any sacks, blankets or shovels, but that’s not to say they weren’t there in the darkness somewhere. His heart was doing a little trip-hammer beat and he wasn’t used to this kind of exertion. Not at his age and not for one of his constitution, which had settled into a kind of physical mediocrity with the coming of late middle-age. There was the hint, the slight burn of anger as well, lurking there under the surface. This had always been a weak point, that passion. 

But he had been looking for a nice, quiet, solitary night at home.

“It was right around here somewhere.”

His jaw dropped slightly.

“Point the light over there—”

Something light-coloured was there.

The beam caught it and the young gendarme looked over at Gilles as they all hovered there in a line.

“That’s the milk—” And the cheese. The butter.

“You’re lucky it didn’t break, Inspector.” It was a strangely unconscious remark.

He let it pass.

Reaching over, Gilles took the flash from the nearest man, who to be completely honest didn’t look like he was even shaving yet.

“What’s up, Inspector?” The gruff sergeant was as genuinely puzzled as Maintenon.

“That’s my bag—my milk…my bread. What in the hell…?”

Gilles pointed the light at the ground. They all saw it, fresh tracks still embedded in the thick grass, lush and green although the trees were denuded, bare branches overhead pale and ghostly in the night when lit from below.

“There.” There was a long depression, the grass flattened in a characteristic way, an oblong shape in the right place.

“Nobody move.”

They sure as hell weren’t going to contradict Sergeant Girard.

Gilles shook his head in amazement.

There was a long moment as he swung the beam off into the darkness. It was difficult to be sure, but he saw what might be drag marks and more footprints, faint and indistinct. The dew was uneven, and it had been a pretty dry week so far.

“Ah. With all due respect, Inspector...”

Maintenon could have sworn the sergeant growled, low and deep in his throat, but he bit off anything further. The boy stopped abruptly, as if he had been about to go on.

Gilles looked over at the youngster.

“Young man.”

“Ah, yes, sir?”

Gilles held his left palm upward, and pointed the hot glare of the light down.

There were quick intakes of breath at the sight of brown, dried blood on his palms and his cuffs.

“Sir. I withdraw my comment.”

Gilles nodded. It was a sensible enough answer.

“Sergeant.”

“Yes, Inspector?”

“I want a photographer, and more men. A lot more. Throw a cordon around the area. Stop and question anyone you see.”

The sergeant nodded.

“Antoine. Call it in.” The boy turned and pelted off, hopefully staying on their own tracks and not making a fresh set.

His heavy steps would be plain enough, being most recently made. It was unavoidable.

“Sir?”

Gilles looked at the other gendarme.

“Stay here. Don’t let anyone come near.” He looked up at Girard. “There were some young people, they came into the park. They were right about here when the girl screamed.”

Standing where he was, he used the light and tried to find their footsteps. There was a paved walkway right there and bare dirt where traffic had worn down the grass. There was a line of disturbances in the leaves, bleached a lighter colour on top but darker on the bottom.

The sergeant, who seemed the quick sort that Gilles had always admired as a young man himself, nodded and pulled out his notebook. Some of them old boys made their immediate superiors, supposedly better-educated and with allegedly advanced training, look rather sick.

Gilles shoved the light in his pocket. He lifted his hat and ran a hand through what would have been hair once.

Girard took out a pen and fell into a habitual pose of which he was supremely unaware.

“Right, sir. Perhaps you’d better start at the beginning.”

“That’s pretty much it—I tripped on a body. It can’t be more than five or ten minutes ago. And it’s not here now.”

Going right by the book, the sergeant looked at his watch, and out of reflex Gilles Maintenon did as well.

“Yes, it must have been about eight, eight-fifteen…right about then.” They needed more men.

There were more sirens on the evening breeze, and it occurred to Gilles that the young people in question had probably gone for the nearest phone, which would be helpful. Hopefully they had left a name, or maybe they would stay on the line.

Other than that, the sergeant and the others knew as much about it as he did.

***

"That's it. That's all I know."

 It was the start of a whole new day.

“That’s it?” Levain wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or not. “You stumbled on a body one minute, and then it’s gone the next?”

“Yes. That’s about the size of it.” Police had gone from door to door, combing the streets and the sidewalks trying to find anybody that might have seen something, heard something. “We have a slew of pictures, maybe, just maybe one drop of human blood on a twig ten metres from the scene…and that’s about it.”

Because the twig was on a shrub between the body and the street Gilles had come in from, they were sort of assuming a direction of travel. The body might have already been dead, if so, then where did it come from, so warm and fresh that blood from cloth and fabric had indelibly stained Gilles’ coat and shirt-sleeve to the extent that both items of clothing were now evidence, exhibits in a case.

As for the shirt. He had a clean white one in a drawer at work, a fairly rational precaution in this line of work. As for the jacket, he wouldn’t miss it particularly and could go home in his old raincoat, which hung on the rack much of the time as he had another, better one at home.

Without a body, they weren’t even sure if it was a stabbing or a shooting. Only that Gilles had stumbled on a man’s body and that he had come away with blood on his hands for it.

He’d been up half the night, the bread was ruined, and when he went to use the milk the next day it was an instant reminder of the new and intriguing mystery.

Even Tailler, with all of his brash and youthful optimism, didn’t know what to make of it.

“So we think that the Inspector either just missed the killing, perhaps a stabbing, or he narrowly missed catching the killer in the disposing of the body?”

Gilles nodded.

“That’s how it looks.” Unfortunately, no one in the neighbourhood had heard anything resembling a shot. “The blood was so fresh—and yet I certainly didn’t hear any shots.”

No one they had been able to talk to reported anything of the kind.

The store was less than two hundred fifty metres away, around one corner and there on the next.

A few potential witnesses in the vicinity had seen other people in the vicinity. Until all of them were identified and interviewed, more or less accounted-for, they had some information but nothing compelling.

No bodies were found in the park, A search of alleys and vacant lots within a six-block radius, which seemed about the ultimate physical and psychological limit, had revealed nothing. Gilles might have heard a car start if it was close by. If so, he recalled nothing of the sort, and with the busy night sounds of the city, anything over a couple of blocks would be completely subconscious in a manner of speaking.

The press had already gotten hold of the story. It had all the earmarks of a nine-day wonder, with headlines dragging a huge tale of question marks and showing mostly pictures of him, the empty park in daylight and one or two locals lucky enough to be interviewed. It was the usual bunch, none of them had seen anything but they lived right there and were foolish enough, vain enough or starved for attention enough to answer the door when the press came pounding.

Levain made a face.

“Well, it’s Girard’s case now. Whoever’s in charge over there.” He looked over at Tailler in humour. 

“They must love you right about now, Gilles.”

"They love you right about now, Gilles."

Gilles nodded.

“Yes. Without a body, and my face all over the front pages. They've got all the attention and nothing much to show for it. Not even the glamour."

“Without a body, he doesn’t stand much of a chance.” Tailler was right about that. “Still, you would think it must turn up somewhere.”

Gilles sat down heavily on the front corner of his desk. He still hadn’t taken his hat off yet.

He looked at Tailler, one of their better acquisitions. The young fellow was learning, and under the steadying hand of Levain and the older men, his natural intuitiveness was being tempered with some solid investigative skills.

“Not necessarily.”

Gilles’ eyes slid from one side to the other. He had a full case-load of his own, nothing really interesting but it was there, stacked up neatly along the front of his desk, and if truth be told, on the long shelf behind it as well. Much of it was routine, some of it was cold and dead, and yet there were things he might conceivably work on. Huge chunks of time were blocked out due to court commitments.

For whatever reason, it was just a busy time.

Resolutely reaching up and removing his hat, he sent the battered black fedora sailing in the general direction of the hat-rack.

It missed, bounced off and then slid down the far wall where it came to rest on top of yet more files. 

Tailler casually picked it up and hung it up for him as Gilles nodded his thanks.

“Coffee, Inspector?”

Gilles nodded, with a look at Levain, who shook his head. Tailler grabbed the pot, turned and left the room looking for hot water.

Gilles, as might be expected, was lost in thought.

There were only so many ways that one could game it out—there were only so many things that could have happened. Things were linked and related. As soon as you had a body, you had a killer or a natural cause, an accident perhaps. If you have blood, a human or other body has been punctured somewhere and somehow. One thing followed logically from another.

It could only be one or the other. As soon as someone moved the body, you had a plot—and so it went on. There had to be a logical train of events.

Or something like that.

As for the canvas of the neighbourhood, word got around and maybe someone with some information would turn up.

It was just a regular day.

His phone was ringing already.

END

Oh, wow. Looks like you can get The Art of Murder from Google Play.  

Thank you for reading.

Paranoid? You bet.

You know that guy's paranoid dontcha.

Ignore the secret messages on the radio.

Any self-respecting paranoid person knows that.

That’s how they try and get at you.

They try to get hold of you. That’s what Cezanne figured.

They’re just trying to get ahold of you. Yet we can’t help but listen to the frickin’ radio. It’s kind of flattering in some ways, and of course we want to know what the bastards are up to.

Sounds like some imminent changes in the works. That’s my reading between the lines.

More later.

***

I’ll be honest.

I watch my mirrors. When someone follows me for too long I take a quick four left or right turns and then follow them for a while. I have one eye in the back of my head. I want to see where they’re going.

I search the faces in the crowd, looking for one wrong nuance. A blink, a twitch, a subtle shift in pheromone levels.

When I see a trap, I spring it. I want to see what happens. Who comes running.

I am perfectly attuned to my environment. I blend in by sticking out head and shoulders above the crowd.

That guy is just a little too obvious. And quiet.

A little too quiet.

No one ever suspects.

I walk inside of their skins, and so they can never find me.

I am aware of my surroundings. I can feel their eyes on the back of my neck, which is not all that interesting when you think about it.

But I know that they are out there.

You, are out there.

And I live with it.

Yeah, I know the oppo could be onto me at any time, especially as the Fem-Bot revolution takes hold on the pages of Cosmo—they’re all replicants in there, don’t you know, that’s different from air-brushing for the uninitiated. They’re hoping I’ll lead them to the next link in the chain, and sooner or later I will, if only by coincidence in a chain of causality with odds so close to zero as makes not much difference.

Didn’t you know that? Never really thought of it, huh?

That’s okay, it’s just that I feed off human company of the virtual kind.

Obama don’t want you to know.

Man.

You got to get a grip on reality.

Whatcha been smokin’?

Nothing?

Well that explains a lot.

So anyway, these two chicks move in across the hall. I know they’re SMERPK but that’s okay.

Bit of a cease-fire going on right now. Negotiations are underway. It’s all very intuitive. For all I know, they’re out of ammo.

Well, it’s not like I speak the lingo or anything. They are that young.

***

So.

Doctor Blowfish, how’s it going? It’s okay, man. Really. Everyone is welcome to read my blog.

Yes, even you.

I make no distinctions. You’ve just strayed from the path.

You’ll figure it out, man. Deep down inside, you’re a pretty nice guy, or half-guy. I see the good in everyone, and you can too. If only you would but try. You’re all bound up in seeing the tiny bit of evil in everyone.

That’s your real problem.

You know what I’m talkin’ about.

I hate to throw a big screw into what is after all a pretty well-oiled operation, but some of your minions have been reading me for years.

It’s why they keep fucking up all the time.

I saw your tutorials on Youtube and now I’m gonna getcha if it’s the last thing I do before I retire. With a full pension including health and dental—one thing the real crims never think of.

You only wish, sonny boy. And you too girlies!

If you ever want to see your goat again, put ten dollars into a fine vellum envelope, preferably unicorn-skin, and stick it into the hole in the big old oak tree out behind the Paranoid Club.

And don’t watch or nothing for me, because the odds are I’ll trip over you while you’re sleeping and neither one of us really wants that, right?

You’ll sleep better in your own bed.

Right?

END OF PSIONIC TRANSMISSION