Audiobooks

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40,000 AI-narrated audiobooks flood Audible, dividing authors and listeners (www.techspot.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I definitely do not want to support this practice, but there's no way to filter these out 😠.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

But this could be revolutionary for media accessibility, and in my mind could easily be worth it for the ability to make new media immediately accessible to folks with vision challenges, deaf and hard of hearing individuals, and a lot of other folks for whom most media is not easily interactive/accessible

As an accessibility add-on / upgrade to standard TTS, sure. Sounds great, even. But I will not accept soulless, robotic, AI-generated voices for something being sold as an audiobook. I just won't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What about if we sweeten the deal and allow you to choose the voice actor on the fly? Want Star wars novels read by James Earl Jones, or Tolkien read by Arnold Schwarzenegger? You can have that with AI voices.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Lol, there is no sweetening the deal. Every one of those is a lost job opportunity for an actual voice actor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Except many books get read by the author or never get read at all so it opens new opportunities for people who wouldn't ever use audio books or books who never will get audio version now vision impaired people have the option to hear them.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

TTS already exists for the visually impaired. Amazon can use AI voices for that all they want (they're better than the default TTS now). Just don't sell me an "audiobook" that's not read by a person.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How about opening up new opportunities for real (if unknown) voice actors to read these books for people?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

There'd be a market for that, just like there's a market for handmade furniture.