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Information technology revolutionized education system. Knowledge now could spread to the remote corners of the country. It caters to the needs of many and the best part is, it is not time bound and has no time limits to the knowledge inputs. A little awareness of operating the gadgets will help to browse and explore the world of knowledge. The use of mobile phone is just made it easy that all the data is available with the finger touch. Books are now made available through online libraries and even audio books which help us in pronunciation and help the students to improve their vocabulary. Technology has helped us to reduce and save paper also to conserve the environment. This helps the students to pursue out of the curriculum subjects. The aids can be derived through focus and without deviation. Space consumption for E-Resources is too less and the devices we use are also portable and handy. We can attach any information to our mail as this secure feature helps us in storing the material land accessible at any place and at any point of time even during our travel. Electronic resources consists of data representing numbers, text graphics, images, moving images, music, sounds etc. All these utilize the multiple ways of brain simulation. Colorful videos and games improve to build the vocabulary and create interest in learning. It is said that imitation is best form of appreciation. Students appreciate and enjoy exposure to these resources and tend to learn quickly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technology revolutionized education system. Knowledge now could spread to the remote corners of the country. It caters to the needs of many and the best part is, it is not time bound and has no time limits to the knowledge inputs. A little awareness of operating the gadgets will help to browse and explore the world of knowledge. The use of mobile phone is just made it easy that all the data is available with the finger touch. Books are now made available through online libraries and even audio books which help us in pronunciation and help the students to improve their vocabulary. Technology has helped us to reduce and save paper also to conserve the environment. This helps the students to pursue out of the curriculum subjects. The aids can be derived through focus and without deviation. Space consumption for E-Resources is too less and the devices we use are also portable and handy. We can attach any information to our mail as this secure feature helps us in storing the material land accessible at any place and at any point of time even during our travel. Electronic resources consists of data representing numbers, text graphics, images, moving images, music, sounds etc. All these utilize the multiple ways of brain simulation. Colorful videos and games improve to build the vocabulary and create interest in learning. It is said that imitation is best form of appreciation. Students appreciate and enjoy exposure to these resources and tend to learn quickly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies show that a person understands an audio better when it is spoken in an accent which is familiar to them. The currently available audiobooks are generally in an accent which may not be familiar to everyone. This may make the listener feel like they have poor listening skills. Studies show that people generally understand the text better when heard in an accent that is very similar to them. The problem in training Hindi Text to speech (TTS) system is that it has a large number of characters which make training models difficult. Also, training TTS system requires a large amount of data as well as large hardware resources. Transliteration is a process of converting speech from one script to another. The problems of large number of characters for training in Hindi is solved using transliteration. The Hindi text is converted to English Script which has 26 characters in comparison to 46 characters in Hindi. The problem of requirement of hardware and data is solved using Transfer Learning on Tacotron2 an WaveGlow. Tacotron2 has a simple encoder decoder network with local sensitive attention mechanism. Using these techniques, the model was able to synthesis speech with only approximately 2 hours of data in approximately 1.5 hours of time on a ColabGPU. This paper creates a Text-to-Speech generator that prompts the input text into the Hindi Indian accent. The model receives a Mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.21 which is near to the ground truth and the existing system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regardless of newly developed forms of narration, listening to stories remains a popular leisure activity. However, storytelling is also evolving. With social robots taking on activities initially conducted by humans, they are emerging as a new storytelling medium. Robots are able to extend human storytelling by adding sounds to the narrative to enhance recipients' emotional reaction to and transportation into the story. To this end, we conducted an online study to compare the traditional audio book to a robotic storyteller, focusing on the influence of adding sound effects and music in both storytelling approaches. Results show that neither emotion induction nor transportation was significantly affected by storytelling medium or additional sounds, but descriptive values indicate a trend towards higher emotion induction and transportation when adding sound to robotic storytelling relative to the audio book condition without additional sounds. Live replications based on this preliminary study might reveal less ambiguous findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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ABSTRACT Readers' advisory services in libraries have traditionally focused heavily on the recommendation of books and audiobooks, excluding wide swaths of other media in the library's collection. To provide readers' advisory across a variety of media formats, we identify and investigate common appeal factors across multiple types of media, including books, films, video games, graphic novels, and music. The project was conducted in two phases: a domain analysis and a user study. During the first phase, we reviewed existing literature and consulted with domain experts to identify 19 appeals across different media types. In the second phase, we interviewed 30 participants who actively consume two or more types of media to understand what kinds of appeals are important and relevant to them when selecting media to consume. We discuss the five most prominent appeals-mood, setting, complexity, character, and theme-in detail, followed by implications on using these cross-media appeals in readers' advisory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audiobooks is booming audibly in the mobile age. According to Global Audiobook Trends and Statistics (2018), audio‐book performed better than e‐book, and US has occupied the largest market share, and the sales reached 21 billion dollars in 2016 and 23.5 billion dollars in 2017. Though previous researches show that the reading comprehension effect of audio channel is better than that on visual channel and the reading comprehension effect of dual channel combining visual and audio channel is better than the single channel. However, is that also established on the new mobile device? Using an experiment approach, we found that (1) The reading comprehension effect of the audio channel is better than that of the visual channel. (2) The reading comprehension effect of the dual channel is better than that of any single channel. That means listen to audiobooks through the audio channel and even the new reading format, like VR reading or AR reading should be encouraged in terms of the reading comprehension effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audiobooks are known to contain a variety of expressive speaking styles that occur as a result of the narrator mimicking a character in a story, or expressing affect. An accurate modeling of this variety is essential for the purposes of speech synthesis from an audiobook. Voice quality differences are important features characterizing these different speaking styles, which are realized on a gradient and are often difficult to predict from the text. The present study uses a parameter characterizing breathy to tense voice qualities using features of the wavelet transform, and a measure for identifying creaky segments in an utterance. Based on these features, a combination of supervised and unsupervised classification is used to detect the regions in an audiobook, where the speaker changes his regular voice quality to a particular voice style. The target voice style candidates are selected based on the agreement of the supervised classifier ensemble output, and evaluated in a listening test. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a framework for the production of digital talking books. These books target primarily the visually impaired community, but users with other characteristics can also benefit from these developments. Special attention is given to the interaction characteristics of the books. Visual and audio are combined to give multimodal access to the books. Methods for enhancing the "reading" experience are focused, as part of a larger setting, enabling the authoring, by reuse and enrichment, of digital multimedia and multimodal documents. We also report some of the preliminary findings of the usability evaluation tests being conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]