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.
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:
pip install audiblez
sudo apt install ffmpeg espeak-ng # on Ubuntu/Debian 🐧
brew install ffmpeg espeak-ng # on Mac 🍏Then, to convert an epub file into an audiobook, just run:
audiblez book.epub -v af_skyIt 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.
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 1.5Use -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 |
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.
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.
by Claudio Santini in 2025, distributed under MIT licence.