- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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It’s Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
Idk, they have pretty good stats that nobody will listen to an audio book if they don’t like the narrator, so being able to choose your own narrator on the fly isn’t really shitty
Enshittification isn’t adding new features that people want, it’s gradually lowering the quality of the product. So here if Audible is solely adding more possibilities, never at the cost of higher quality ones degrading, then indeed I’m wrong.
If though they hire less people to do good voice acting, then it’s really shitty.
I genuinely hope I’m wrong and they are ONLY adding new capabilities… but my entire experience with capitalism is that obtaining a monopolistic position is not done to improve quality but rather to increase margins regardless of how.
We’ll see!
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.
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.
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That award was rescinded and given to Roy Dotrice for A Game of Thrones (2004) where he voiced 224 characters.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
Beautiful, it works. Why not.
I only get the ones with a famous narrator or the author.
AI can mimic those :/
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.
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?
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.
More jobless, desperate people.
Well that’s a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.
This is dumb as hell… if I wanted AI to read a book poorly to me, I’d just use screen reading accessibility features.
Are there any good ones nowadays that don’t sound like a robot?
Sure there are. ElevenLabs is one. You can probably tell they’re not human but they’re really decent.
Just tried it. Still a machine buy much better than default TTS.
In 10 years it’s probably gonna be really impressive.
They still don’t understand the context of what they’re reading though so they can’t apply tone correctly.
Fair. Definitely some awkward phrasing, but it’ll get better.
From what I’ve been able to hear it’s not that bad. They’re pretty good at having a general tone. But they may fail when it comes to emotional tones, like anger or sadness. But for just reading a book aloud there shouldn’t be any issue.
No
Speechify is probably the best option for this particular usecase.
Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.
Pretty much anything handling unstructed data (audio, video, text) is using training data that has copyrighted content.
Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….
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.
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.
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.
AI will write them and AI will read them to us.
Let AI pay for them and AI listen to them too. That way we can pay for and listen to actually good ones.
Stock up on old physical books
It is easier to keep the books than what’s written in them…
that’s gross.
For now at least I bet this’ll be pretty mediocre. I’m a big audiobook fan and voice actors have a massive impact on the quality of the finished product. A great voice actor can make a mediocre book fun and engaging, a bad one can make a great book unlistenable. The best do great voice differentiation. As an example I’ve really enjoyed Andrea Parsneau’s work in The Wandering Inn series.
Patrick Tull’s Aubrey/Maturin series is fucking amazing.
Imagine not liking the voicing of a book, so you just pick a different one.
You seem to be implying that’s ridiculous, but it is indeed exactly like that, though it’s not like I’m expecting every performance to be a masterpiece.
It’s also pretty subjective, for example folks either seem to love or hate R. C. Bray. My mother can’t stand the guy’s style, I think he’s okay.
No, I think it’s great to be able to get rid of shitty voice work with the click of a button. Wish I could use it on my bf’s Brian Sanderson audiobooks. That guy’s simpering, exaggeratedly high pitched female voices are so unpleasant to listen to.
Ah, I see what you’re saying, I misunderstood and thought you were taking about picking a different book. Indeed, for the worst case scenario a mediocre AI voice could be an improvement!
trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
Well, yeah, you can. Whoever told you that you can’t, don’t believe them, they are probably being payed to say it. You could also pay for the book to support the author but most likely your money will not go to the author so don’t bother.
AI voices are not trained on books.
The ethical issue there is more around cloning celebrities
but AI itself is
Not sure what you are trying to say here. AI itself is an equation.
AI models have been trained on copyright protected books illegally. Maybe the voice have not
In this case the AI voices are reading the exact copyrighted material so the original author or rights holder must be contacted to secure the necessary rights and licensing agreements. There is no free use argument.
Now, if the voices have been trained on copy protected sources to create a likenesses (e.g. Scarlet Johansson) then there could be a lawsuit.
I like your way of thinking
This has actually got me thinking differently about AI all together.
The best use for AI needs to be for the individual. I want MY ai to read books or research with or complete tasks for me.
I don’t want another company to do it for me or monetize it or steal content with it.
isn’t the current law not recognising AI stuff for copyright?
IE, downloading their audiobooks illegally is impossible are they are by default in the public domain.
Hmmm, you might have a case but maybe not.
The US Copyright office currently does not recognize protections for AI-generated works, and for portions of complete works that are AI-generated. For example, if a comic has graphics generated by AI but a script written by people, the graphics and character likenesses, etc are not protected by copyright.
For audiobooks, the original work and the accompanying recording are both protected by copyright. The audiobook is considered a derivative work, so it may still be protected based on the fact that the original work is rightfully protected by copyright.
Yep, copyright doesn’t apply to AI generated content.
(edit: the original book copyright would still apply however… So would only be public domain if the book itself was also public domain)
free AI read audiobooks coming up
deleted by creator
Me too: there’s just something about how repetitive thier cadence can be, and putting random infections and stresses on words where it doesn’t make sense.
How about I spin up an AI model that outputs a near 1:1 copy of the training data?
Does that circumvent the copyright?
Duno, probably to some extent, similarly to how remixes of music sometimes have to pay royalties to the source of the sample if it’s recognisable…?
Actually would probably be more similar to the George Carlin AI impersonation lawsuit , but they settled, so idk.
