Audiobooks & AI

[Frogm4n]

That amount of lisp would never make it past a real recording studio. Wow.

[Graham44]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

There are models that can be annotated with emotions.

Does AI surpass the best human readers? No. But they are leagues above the old TTS and honestly a lot of people if my high school English class was remotely typical.

All I want is them to sound natural and not flub words.

IMO I could listen to whole book if it sounded like this.

For me the cadence in that demo was off - it doesn't sound natural at all, especially when it says 'silhouetted against the Primose yellow' - you can tell instantly it's not a human voice. It was clear and crisp and easy to understand,but it wasn't pleasant to listen to.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Graham44

For me the cadence in that demo was off - it doesn't sound natural at all, especially when it says 'silhouetted against the Primose yellow' - you can tell instantly it's not a human voice. It was clear and crisp and easy to understand,but it wasn't pleasant to listen to.

Exactly.

Shari

[shuvashish76]

https://goodereader.com/blog/audiobo...-ai-audiobooks
Audible is beginning to focus on AI Audiobooks

[Frogm4n]

FYI, Bad Ereader has a terrible reputation in the ereader community. They lie often, plagiarize, and publish biased articles without revealing their financial interests in the products.

[rantanplan]

Audible did post it themselves https://www.audible.com/about/newsro...for-publishers

[JBaby]

Originally Posted by Frogm4n

FYI, Bad Ereader has a terrible reputation in the ereader community. They lie often, plagiarize, and publish biased articles without revealing their financial interests in the products.

And they steal pics from r/Kindle members and mods and don’t give credit.

[ChrisHistorian76]

I think we allknow why Audible, and eventually audiobook divisions of traditional print book publishers, will increasingly use AI, $$$. They (and especially their investors) would much rather not pay a human to do something if there's any possible way to avoid it. The increasing use of AI is the main sticking point preventing the resolution of a voice actors strike that began almost a year ago.

Does anyone know how much control an author usually has over the production of an audiobook version of their work? I can definitely see a (sad) future where most audiobooks are done by AI regardless of what the author wants. Only the bigger name authors may have the ability to push back against a publisher.

It's probably too early for there to be much financial data on AI "narrated/created" audiobooks vs human narration. If the book buying public rejects AI narration, hopefully that'll make publishers think twice about it.

You can hand them a list of words that have non-obvious pronunciation and they have the smarts to stop and ask if they run into a word that isn't on their list.

This! Not long ago, 2K games chairman Strauss Zelnick said that AI and machine learning are both misnomers, because machines can't learn like humans. They certainly can't quickly adapt/learn like humans can because they're not "thinking" they're simply following their programming and training. To correctly pronounce a word, an AI audiobot has to be "trained." Corrections are simply not going to happen "on the fly" like they can with a human. This is to say nothing of the fact the data used to train AI is often obtained unethically or sometimes outright illegally.

[Quoth]

Neural Networks, Machine Learning and AI are all marketing terms. They have no real relation to any biological or sentient process.

Re Control: Depends on the deal with a publisher, which in the past was only paper rights, not ebooks, audio narration, play, TV or movie.