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 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.

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.

trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?

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

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

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...

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.

It's Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.

Oh, goody! I hope they use that TikTok lady's voice! It's my favorite!

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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.

Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.

youtube already does it.