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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.
Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.
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.
Well that’s a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
Save a profile in tts server, then go into read > tts settings and change voice to profile you saved. I don’t remember but you may need readera premium.
Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….
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.
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 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.
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
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!
Accessibility and performance art are separate categories
Ok?
Audiobooks for the deaf? Excuse me?
Sign language books. Now there’s a hole in the market 😆
I meant eye deaf
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
I assumed they did. Maybe not all, to be fair, but I am pretty sure they have produced audio recordings of books in the past(?)
Maybe I’m just tripping, I dunno.
Its not that audible hires the narator themselves more like they just ways of putting writers in Touch with narrators
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
deleted by creator
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.
The professional ai voices are amazing
Why would they when you can just plug any epub into a program and use google tts. Ive listened to about a book a day for the past few years doing this and i love it. Yeah it took getting used too, but once you find an ai voice you like and figure out which words to auto replace to sound right its honestly better then an audiobook. Well at least to me it is, i could never stand when the reader would change their voice for different characters.
My experience is these systems never get the intonation and stresses right. It drives me nuts and I can’t listen to it.
Idk how much experience you have with this type of thing, but when I listen to my books i use my imagination to picture and hear things the way i want just like when i read a book normally. Ive read well over a 1000 books doing so, and that doesnt count rereads, and having the ability and willingness to use this method has drastically increased the amount i read but also my enjoyment doing so. The app i use also allows me to edit words and phrases throughput the book where i can correct how things are pronounced. Hell there’s a series that has this stupid catchphrase that i completely removed from all 20 books cause it was annoying. Im sure im only a single person that likes this method, but if i can find it enjoyable then when real ai gets put to work it’ll capture others.
This is what I don’t get from a business standpoint. Why would anyone buy an AI read audiobook for $20 when they can get the exact same audio by buying the ebook for $0.99 and running it through AI?
I am okay with this only in cases where 1) the author approves, and 2) there is no audible version anyways.
Some people prefer listening to their books instead of reading and that’s totally ok. Indie authors can’t always afford to hire a narrator but I’d still want the buyers to be able to listen to the book.
Big question is, will the author get paid for the download or not…
I wouldn’t support it even if the author couldn’t afford it otherwise. There’s no test to confirm that and knowing profit margines, all publishers will use AI for all their books.
Yes, I’d want smaller authors to have people listen to their books, but without oversight, it’s going to ruin all audiobooks.
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.
All I can think of is Jim Dale’s reading of the Harry Potter books. Fucking epic.
What, no way, they did not replace Steven Fry.
They didn’t replace Fry. When the Audiobooks were released in the US, they were read by Jim Dale. Fry was for the rest of the English language releases. During the run, Jim Dale broke the world record for the most character voices performed by a single actor in an audiobook (146).
That award was rescinded and given to Roy Dotrice for A Game of Thrones (2004) where he voiced 224 characters. I believe Jim Dale did hold the record before that though with 134 voices for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Also Andy Serkis reading the lord of the rings. 11/10
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.
Usually I agree with this with the exception of hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy where the audio drama is much better than the audiobook version.
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.
I’ve listened to a couple audiobooks where the author did the voice and i liked them. They know how phrases need to sound like better then an AI i would assume.
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.
And unless you are Stephan King or the like exactly how are you going to get the publishing cartel (I think they re consolidated downs to 3-4 publishers now) to change their contract to not include this? Their response will almost certainly be either “that’s non-negotiable” or “ok then you get half as much money”.
Publishers will at least retain the right to use AI audio books for themselves. And it’s much easier for an author to get a piece of something the publisher does than it is for them to get money for books Amazon recorded without their consent.
This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.
There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it’s impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
There are thousands of books released every year. That’s impossible to cover even in English alone.
Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.
In fact since AI moat is so minimal this will very quickly be adapted by open source solution providing audio book access to millions if not billions of people to whom this was not an option. Its amazing.
Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
And you think anyone is training AI voice models for those languages? Have you even seen how long it takes even large companies like Google to support the languages with hundreds of millions of speakers?
It becomes easier and cheaper every day. Today’s open source LLMs are better than last year’s best model.
Is it? I just tried again yesterday for a simple script since coding is the one thing apparently AI will replace people like me and it could not put together a working JavaScript script.
I have yet to see tangible results not announced by the people with sunken cost exploding their balls.
Sounds like a skill issue my dude. While you struggle to get a js script people are putting out entire programs with AI assistants so sure - you’re right and they’re wrong
yeah, I guess I didn’t prompt right lol
Yes, to effectively use AI you actually have to understand the medium you’re in to describe the problem you’re trying to solve. You can get there with prompting but it’ll take you much longer if you just don’t understand code yourself.
Thats why most senior software devs are not afraid of LLMs cause they need strong oversight and thats exactly what years of software dev experience trained you to do.
I’m a programmer with 22 years of experience. I understood the code well enough having written the solution myself the day before; I was precisely trying to see if AI would be useful with this example as it was a tad above basic stuff but not niche at all…
It failed miserably. The code ran but didn’t do anyithing at all or it did the wrong thing 4updating the wrong column for example). It would often ignore my requirements in favour of something easier
The worst part is it kept saying it “got it” and telling me some bs about why it didn’t work just to not correct it
Thats why most senior software devs are not afraid of LLMs cause they need strong oversight and thats exactly what years of software dev experience trained you to do.
what’s the point of this? If it cannot provide clean code and I have to check every line myself, I rather work with a junior who would usually do better, actually learn from my feedback and their experience and eventually become an independant asset
Stop drinking the kool aid
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding the comment you replied to, they are not saying that voice AI are bad, they are saying there is not enough training data to improve the AI for these languages. How will it improve without good training data?
Thats not how AI training works and even then there’s absolutely enough data. Also training data can be created and even synthesized. There are many techniques to extract make training value from datasets that we discover every year - It’s really not a problem you think it is.
I’m genuinely confused how AI illiterate users here are. It’s just blind leading the blind.
That’s the benefit of using AI and machine learning - once you have enough source material, you can throw it all in and it’ll eventually spit out a model.
Which is exactly what Meta did with their Massively Multilingual Speech project which supports text-to-speech and speech-to-text for 1107 different languages.Is it actually any good in 99% of them, I don’t have a clue, but it exists.
Seems more like a proof of concept project for that paper than something they are pursuing seriously judging by the GitHub location in some example folder that hasn’t seen any significant updates in over a year. If it is so great I would assume they would pursue it more actively and replace existing models with it two years later.
dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth
I’m pretty sure they’d be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
Sure but that’s not how free markets work. If there’s only 3 million consumers you can’t afford 3 million voice actors but you can afford 3 million AI renders.
I’m not an economist but… 1 voice actor can serve 3 million consumers if they listen to the same content.
Anyway that’s not even my point, my point is that it is possible to cover, we as a society, driven both by VC with strategies of capturing markets (so precisely going against “free” market as an ideal) and consumers are making choices (like when one buys from the local farmer market vs Amazon deliveries). If though we, while fully understanding the consequence of such choice (namely how the sausage is made, here how AI models are trained and then run), believe it’s not valuable then sure, we can make that choice.
I’m just warning consumers then that if they don’t pay for quality content made a certain way, they can’t complain that they in turn don’t get the job they wanted because nobody out there is ready to pay for it.
2 sides of the same coin.
but for a service like audible.
