1 Nephi Chapter 1 | The Book of Mormon | Read by Russ Tanner

The Book of Mormon is the property of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. © 1981 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

In mid-2024, I decided to record myself reading the Book of Mormon and create a video for all 239 chapters. If you think I'm crazy, you're probably right—it was a LOT of work. But there's a method to the madness. The project kills four birds with one stone:

Bird 1:
Reading and recording myself reading the scriptures is a unique and meaningful way to share my voice with my posterity—kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and beyond. If any of them are like me, they'll be curious about what their grandpa, great-grandpa, or great-great-grandpa sounded like. I also want them to know that the scriptures are important enough to me that I would do something like this.

Bird 2:
It allowed me to study the Book of Mormon from a different angle. You pick up things you didn't notice before when you pay attention to every word multiple times.

Bird 3:
My reading comprehension improves when I read out loud, but doing so can be tiring and inconvenient. Listening to the scriptures in my own voice is the next best thing to reading them out loud.

Bird 4:
I figured there are probably a handful of people who would appreciate listening to the scriptures in a different voice.

When I first started recording the audio (1 Nephi Chapter 1), I quickly realized that getting a clean recording without voice cracks, background noise, consistent volume levels, etc., was extremely difficult. I almost gave up, but I figured there was a technological solution that could help me get the job done.

I did some digging and came across a service called ElevenLabs. They are (as of mid-2024) one of the best AI text-to-speech services. I paid for a plan and had them professionally clone my voice. There's a big difference between basic voice cloning and professional voice cloning.

To have my voice professionally cloned, I had to read and record 3 hours of high-quality audio and wait two (maybe three?) weeks for them to perform their wizardry.

How good is the voice cloning? It's so good that 99.5% of the time, I can't tell I didn't record the words I'm listening to...and it's MY voice!

I had my 12-year-old daughter listen to my video of 1 Nephi Chapter 1. After she finished, I told her, "I didn't record that." She gave me a puzzled look and started laughing. She didn't believe it wasn't me until I showed her how I did it. Her reaction was good enough for me to continue with the project.

If you want your own voice cloned, visit Eleven Labs: https://elevenlabs.io/?from=russtanne...

Voice cloning was only one part of the project, though. The Book of Mormon has a lot of unusual people and place names. I had to create a phonetic pronunciation guide (you can access it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...) and run the text through ChatGPT, which swapped out unusual people and place names with the phonetic tag replacements. Once that was done, it was ready for ElevenLabs processing, which included adding pause tags to improve the pacing.

I'm happy with how the project turned out, and hopefully, a few people will find these videos and enjoy them.