trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
This has actually got me thinking differently about AI all together.
The best use for AI needs to be for the individual. I want MY ai to read books or research with or complete tasks for me.
I don’t want another company to do it for me or monetize it or steal content with it.
I can get that for free. There are apps that will read an ebook to you already. The whole point of paying the premium on audible is the superior reading/acting. Not put up with mispronounced words, weird cadence and an inability to handle acronyms
I’ve tried one that works surprisingly well. Each sentence had great pacing, cadence, and correct enunciation- even had tone right when someone was shouting or angry or sad.
I wouldn’t really recommend it, though. While I couldn’t pick any single thing out that was wrong, overall it just didn’t quite flow. It’s like watching someone try to act that is technically doing everything right, but it just isn’t good. It basically didn’t understand the greater context of the story and was saying lines.
It was uncanny valley, but exclusively with voice.
Oh, goody! I hope they use that TikTok lady’s voice! It’s my favorite!
I hate so much that this has a 100% chance of becoming a norm. Narrator can make a mediocre book shine, or turn a good book into a fucking rollercoaster (Andy Serkis, anyone?)
AI? Not a great narrator. Its character voices are boring, intonations weird, pacing awful. I’d honestly rather get an amateur narrating it for fun, over a robot sounding like a knock-off Morgan Freeman.
Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.
Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….
I prefer listening to real people. No matter how good AI voices become, I still like knowing that the one reading the book to me understands what they are saying.
I watch those movie recaps from YouTube while I work. The AI was obviously talking about a nine one one call but called it a nine hundred and eleven. Or when it’s talking about nine eleven. It instantly snaps you out of it. It’s sorta funny as background noise but I would 100% be avoiding it as a purchase.
The issue is there’s a million books out there with no audio and never will. Im ok with Ai doing readings on books that wouldn’t otherwise get an audio version
Yeah i can see worls of non fiction being a good candidate.
Sure, but it is still lame for a company like Audible to expect people to pay for their service and then they decide to cut costs by switching to AI voices. They can afford to hire actors to read their books. They have no excuse to go do that.
Meanwhile what you’re talking about if books and stories that may not get to be picked to be narrated and well, I can see where ai voices could be a benefit in those cases. Especially for people with dyslexia.
I just disagree with a company that sells itself on narrated books and then they go and have robots read their shit? Why should anyone pay for that? Because I’m sure their prices wouldn’t go down either.
And when all is said and done, personally, I just prefer that a human being is reading to me. Especially if it is fiction.
Does audible actually do the audiobooks? I assumed it was the publishers. Sometimes the books i want aren’t available on audio which I listen to while working
There are Audible originals that you can only get on their platform. Audiobook sellers like libro.fm and streamers like Storytel don’t get access to those.
With machine voice with no attempts at imitate human’s intonation - yes.
Hey for the deaf and people who need the info on the page, robot voice is better than nothing.
Just pretend the book is being narrated by Stephen Hawking!
Audiobooks for the deaf? Excuse me?
I meant eye deaf
Sign language books. Now there’s a hole in the market 😆
I completely agree. I don’t even like it when the human reader clearly doesn’t understand what they’re saying, so some AI flatly telling me the story isn’t going to cut it.
For the humans, someone mispronounced “quay” for example. “La Jolla” was another standout mistake that took me out of the story.
Dude, I know how you feel xD back in 2009 I bought an audio recording of the first Twilight book because I was curious about ehat the fuss was about. It was in Danish, as I am Danish, and the narrator, bless her, had a very Danish way of pronouncing the word “flirting”. In Danish we don’t have a modern word for flirting so we just use the English one with English pronunciation, but this lady, who already sounded like she was in her 60s, just went full Dane on that word and it completely took me out of the story and had me yell at my ghettoblaster “FLIRTING” everytime she pronounced her mutilated version of that word. I don’t even know how to write a phonetic version of what the fuck she said, but I’ll try.
Fleert-eh
Fuck me, it’s been almost 16 years and just spelling it out made my skin crawl.
I also hated that book, but that wasn’t really the narrator’s fault. Had to pause the fuck out of it several times and rage clean my apartment. Nobody had told me about how it romanticized abusive relationships and I had JUST gotten out of one of those so to say I was triggered was an understatement. The mispronounciations of flirting were just the garnish on top, lol.
It was bound to happen. I’m okay with ones that were never going to be turned into audiobooks to begin with… but they likely will use that as the norm for all books… I guess unless the author/publisher says not to.
Yeah currently contracts require the author’s or publisher’s consent. If anyone is a writer make sure to triple check your contracts for this shit.
Well that’s a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.
It wasn’t the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.
No publisher is going to pay a professional to narrate their audiobooks when they can have AI do a shitty job for much less.
A shitty narrator can get me to hate a book I like. A great narrator can bring the characters to life, enhance the experience, and turn me from a listener to a fan. I’ve searched for books by narrators like Nick Podehl and Jeff Hayes and bought audiobooks I wouldn’t have otherwise.
That depends entirely on how profitable it is and how much they can get authors onboard.
I do agree that a good narrator delivers a performance that adds the work. James Marster will always be Harry Dresden in my head.
That depends entirely on how profitable it is and how much they can get authors onboard.
A. Anything can be profitable when the cost to generation will be counted in singles of dollars instead of multiple thousands for a good narrator. They don’t even have to sell many to turn a profit too.
B. You think authors are going to have a choice? Lmfao. It’s the publishers that hold any real power and they will jump all over everyone’s IP with AI slop to make an extra three cents.
It’s the publishers that hold any real power
It might be time to finally change that, especially considering what a piss poor job they have been doing for decades at their own part of the production of media.
A shitty narrator can get me to hate a book I like.
And that is where I see potential for AI. There are quite a few books which I’d love to listen to but they are all narrated by a guy whose narration I can’t stand. AI would open the possibility to choose a voice and I might actually get to enjoy those books. It’s Amazon though so the ethical implications and quality concerns are something I’m worried about.
Did you ever heard a single AI-narrated content that did not make you run away screaming?
You think they’ll be narrating books with Tiktok TTS?
To rephrase my question: where can I listen to an example of good AI spoken content?
First thing that comes to my mind would be Dougdoug. He’s a streamer who messes around with AI a fair bit for funny content, including using AI-generated voices at times.
Hm. I wasn’t able to listen to all 9:53:57, but in the samples I watched I heard a voice resembling the classical computer voice of Science Fiction movies of the 70s. Better than most YouTube AI generated audio content, but good enough to narrate audio books? Well, we’ll accustom to anything, I guess.
I don’t know if my timestamp went through, but the part I linked to was at 7h/19m/42s. That’s the relevant part, not necessarily the entire video. That’s a showcase of good AI voices.
This consumer says you don’t get a red cent then!
It’s already a plague on youtube where half of the docu style vids are AI narrated already. I quit them in disgust. It’s so frustrating. It has eroded my perception of Youtube in short time.
For now at least I bet this’ll be pretty mediocre. I’m a big audiobook fan and voice actors have a massive impact on the quality of the finished product. A great voice actor can make a mediocre book fun and engaging, a bad one can make a great book unlistenable. The best do great voice differentiation. As an example I’ve really enjoyed Andrea Parsneau’s work in The Wandering Inn series.
Imagine not liking the voicing of a book, so you just pick a different one.
You seem to be implying that’s ridiculous, but it is indeed exactly like that, though it’s not like I’m expecting every performance to be a masterpiece.
It’s also pretty subjective, for example folks either seem to love or hate R. C. Bray. My mother can’t stand the guy’s style, I think he’s okay.
No, I think it’s great to be able to get rid of shitty voice work with the click of a button. Wish I could use it on my bf’s Brian Sanderson audiobooks. That guy’s simpering, exaggeratedly high pitched female voices are so unpleasant to listen to.
Ah, I see what you’re saying, I misunderstood and thought you were taking about picking a different book. Indeed, for the worst case scenario a mediocre AI voice could be an improvement!
Am I glad to have dropped everything Amazon.
I de-audibled my entire library, stored on Audiobookshelf and I’ll only buy audiobooks from libro.fm
Fucking gross. Maybe it’s the 250+ audiobooks I have influencing me, but the very best ones I’ve listened to transcend just turning words into sound. Sound effects, music, tone, emotion, accents, sarcasm, and god damn BLOOPERS all improve the experience beyond just hearing what is written down.
I’m against it, fuck that literal noise.
Sound effects, music […] improve the experience
Actually hard disagreeing on that. I absolutely hate the audio drama versions of audio books and prefer the narrator only ones since they are much clearer and require a lot less focus to listen to and work in more contexts (background noise,…). Sound effects and music (while something is read, intro or outro style music is okay) distract from the actual content.
