The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[cgsmom]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Poor Will.

Well, that made me laugh out loud. When I was growing up, my Dad loved westerns and war movies. Whenever someone would say "Fire at will", Mom would yell "Run Will run".

[Quoth]

Also Bill Posters is innocent.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Also Bill Posters is innocent.

Bill posters are not innocent. They post the bills so we have to pay them.

[dewd]

Originally Posted by issybird

I’ve got to use up three credits from Audible, not immediately as I paused my membership a while back, but soon enough that I need to start thinking about it.

There's a sneaky-but-legit trick you can use to postpone using your credits: use them to pre-order audiobooks that aren't yet published. Then, after your membership has ended, and you've zero credits left, cancel the pre-orders. You'll get the credits back.

And here’s where the rant comes in. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that filtering by category, especially of recent releases and coming soon would result in a plethora of options. Hahahahaha. Because here’s the thing: I only want trad-pubbed books read by professional narrators. No virtual voice, thankyouverymuch. And no AI-generated books. And as far as I can tell, there’s no way to exclude them.

The search is bad, I agree. The advanced search is a bit better but they don't offer an easy way to find it - the trick is to add "advsr" to the end of whatever Audible marketplace you're in, so for US it's https://www.audible.com/advsr and for UK it's https://www.audible.co.uk/advsr and so on. Using that search, you can also add "-virtual" (no quotes) into the search box and it removes the virtual voice. Or if you've already got a search that you're using, add this to the end of the URL: "&keywords=-virtual_voice".

[Renate]

I never listen to audio books, only radio theatre (or whatever we call it).
How bad is virtual voicing?
Is it that it doesn't understand the sentence and it comes off-kilter?
Or that it barfs on names or uncommon words?

[issybird]

Originally Posted by dewd

There's a sneaky-but-legit trick you can use to postpone using your credits: use them to pre-order audiobooks that aren't yet published. Then, after your membership has ended, and you've zero credits left, cancel the pre-orders. You'll get the credits back.



The search is bad, I agree. The advanced search is a bit better but they don't offer an easy way to find it - the trick is to add "advsr" to the end of whatever Audible marketplace you're in, so for US it's https://www.audible.com/advsr and for UK it's https://www.audible.co.uk/advsr and so on. Using that search, you can also add "-virtual" (no quotes) into the search box and it removes the virtual voice. Or if you've already got a search that you're using, add this to the end of the URL: "&keywords=-virtual_voice".

Thank you! I knew that you could preorder books and then quit, but this is a new wrinkle on that strategy. And the search limitation will be very helpful indeed.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Renate

I never listen to audio books, only radio theatre (or whatever we call it).
How bad is virtual voicing?
Is it that it doesn't understand the sentence and it comes off-kilter?
Or that it barfs on names or uncommon words?

I've only ever used Alexa and I don't know if virtual voice (or other platforms) do a better job. She's ok. More nuance than you'd expect and pretty good at pronunciation; her worst failing is that she doesn't know the difference between "content" (happy) and "content" (innards). Or "produce" (make) and "produce" (veggies). Or "present" and "present". Etc. It's jarring. And while she's animated, not monotone, she obviously can't do different characterizations. It's all just her. Kind of like a dumb but enthusiastic babysitter.

It's good enough to tide me over with a Kindle book when I want to keep going but have to be hands or eyes or both free, but "free" is the operative word.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by issybird

I've only ever used Alexa and I don't know if virtual voice (or other platforms) do a better job. She's ok. More nuance than you'd expect and pretty good at pronunciation; her worst failing is that she doesn't know the difference between "content" (happy) and "content" (innards). Or "produce" (make) and "produce" (veggies). Or "present" and "present". Etc. It's jarring. And while she's animated, not monotone, she obviously can't do different characterizations. It's all just her. Kind of like a dumb but enthusiastic babysitter.

It's good enough to tide me over with a Kindle book when I want to keep going but have to be hands or eyes or both free, but "free" is the operative word.

They all kinda suck that way. I think the newer TTS models that benefit from LLMs giving some context to what is being read can help so hopefully in a few years it'll be better.

[Quoth]

They sound much better than 40 years ago, but only good enough for free reading of text you bought or wrote. Some material works better than others and LLM only helps with known phrases. It has no understanding of context. It might get slightly better, but Google and Amazon are being deceptive marketing it to content providers and selling result to the public. None of it is significantly better than free local TTS.