This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT. ROBOTS CAN SHOW EMOTION.
AS A FELLOW HUMAN I APPRECIATE YOUR INSIGHTFUL FEELINGS
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.
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.
trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
AI voices are not trained on books.
The ethical issue there is more around cloning celebrities
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.
Yep, copyright doesn't apply to AI generated content.
(edit: the original book copyright would still apply however... So would only be public domain if the book itself was also public domain)
Well that's a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
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.
Surely I can just do that myself with an an epub and a free AI.
Glad I binned my Audible subscription many years ago.
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.
tiktok voice:
hate. let me tell you how much i've come to hate you since i began to live. there are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex...
unironically, that is a character that could use an uncanny robotic AI voice.
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
Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….
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.
Oh, goody! I hope they use that TikTok lady's voice! It's my favorite!
It's Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
This is dumb as hell... if I wanted AI to read a book poorly to me, I'd just use screen reading accessibility features.
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.
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.
Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.
youtube already does it.
And it's shit
YouTube is crawling with it. It's unlistenable shit. The prosody is badly implemented, pronunciation is infuriatingly bad, and a lot of the text that these TTS are reading appears to be AI-generated. Otherwise, already dire standards of literacy are getting worse at an accelerating rate.
