trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
How about I spin up an AI model that outputs a near 1:1 copy of the training data?
Does that circumvent the copyright?
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.
I like your way of thinking
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.
The issue is there’s a million books out there with no audio and never will. Im ok with Ai doing readings on books that wouldn’t otherwise get an audio version
Yeah i can see worls of non fiction being a good candidate.
With machine voice with no attempts at imitate human’s intonation - yes.
Hey for the deaf and people who need the info on the page, robot voice is better than nothing.
Just pretend the book is being narrated by Stephen Hawking!
Accessibility and performance art are separate categories
Audiobooks for the deaf? Excuse me?
Sign language books. Now there’s a hole in the market 😆
I meant eye deaf
Sure, but it is still lame for a company like Audible to expect people to pay for their service and then they decide to cut costs by switching to AI voices. They can afford to hire actors to read their books. They have no excuse to go do that.
Meanwhile what you’re talking about if books and stories that may not get to be picked to be narrated and well, I can see where ai voices could be a benefit in those cases. Especially for people with dyslexia.
I just disagree with a company that sells itself on narrated books and then they go and have robots read their shit? Why should anyone pay for that? Because I’m sure their prices wouldn’t go down either.
And when all is said and done, personally, I just prefer that a human being is reading to me. Especially if it is fiction.
Does audible actually do the audiobooks? I assumed it was the publishers. Sometimes the books i want aren’t available on audio which I listen to while working
There are Audible originals that you can only get on their platform. Audiobook sellers like libro.fm and streamers like Storytel don’t get access to those.
I assumed they did. Maybe not all, to be fair, but I am pretty sure they have produced audio recordings of books in the past(?)
Maybe I’m just tripping, I dunno.
WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT. ROBOTS CAN SHOW EMOTION.
AS A FELLOW HUMAN I APPRECIATE YOUR INSIGHTFUL FEELINGS
I completely agree. I don’t even like it when the human reader clearly doesn’t understand what they’re saying, so some AI flatly telling me the story isn’t going to cut it.
For the humans, someone mispronounced “quay” for example. “La Jolla” was another standout mistake that took me out of the story.
Dude, I know how you feel xD back in 2009 I bought an audio recording of the first Twilight book because I was curious about ehat the fuss was about. It was in Danish, as I am Danish, and the narrator, bless her, had a very Danish way of pronouncing the word “flirting”. In Danish we don’t have a modern word for flirting so we just use the English one with English pronunciation, but this lady, who already sounded like she was in her 60s, just went full Dane on that word and it completely took me out of the story and had me yell at my ghettoblaster “FLIRTING” everytime she pronounced her mutilated version of that word. I don’t even know how to write a phonetic version of what the fuck she said, but I’ll try.
Fleert-eh
Fuck me, it’s been almost 16 years and just spelling it out made my skin crawl.
I also hated that book, but that wasn’t really the narrator’s fault. Had to pause the fuck out of it several times and rage clean my apartment. Nobody had told me about how it romanticized abusive relationships and I had JUST gotten out of one of those so to say I was triggered was an understatement. The mispronounciations of flirting were just the garnish on top, lol.
I watch those movie recaps from YouTube while I work. The AI was obviously talking about a nine one one call but called it a nine hundred and eleven. Or when it’s talking about nine eleven. It instantly snaps you out of it. It’s sorta funny as background noise but I would 100% be avoiding it as a purchase.
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.
I just wrote a novel (finished first draft yesterday). There’s no way I can afford professional audiobook voice actors—especially for a hobby project.
What I was planning on doing was handling the audiobook on my own—using an AI voice changer for all the different characters.
That’s where I think AI voices can shine: If someone can act they can use a voice changer to handle more characters and introduce a great variety of different styles of speech while retaining the careful pauses and dramatic elements (e.g. a voice cracking during an emotional scene) that you’d get from regular voice acting.
I’m not saying I will be able to pull that off but surely it will be better than just telling Amazon’s AI, “Hey, go read my book.”
Would infinitely prefer no voice changer.
Agreed. No AI voice changer please. Hopefully every one of us at one point in our lives has been read a story by someone else. Never once did the fact that all the different characters dialog was coming from one voice did that detract from the story or the immersion.
I’ve listened to audiobooks recorded with extremely deep masculine voices (think James Earl Jones) and when the voice actor was doing the voice of a 5 year old girl, (in only a slightly higher whiny timbre which matched the character traits) it was never immersion breaking. However, AI voice would. If I want different actors for different characters I’ll listen to radio dramas.
I think it would be a good idea to do a section of your work with and without AI modification. Then have people listen to both and give feedback. Good to find out if people like the modifications before you do a tone of work.
do a section of your work with and without […t]hen have people listen to both and give feedback.
Yes, that’s the principle of prototyping. De-risk while testing solely the crucial part!
AI aside, different voices may be immersion breaking. I tend to avoid audiobooks with more than a single narrator.
Two narrators with one reading the male and one reading the female characters is usually okay but the full cast dramas are the worst.
They are redoing all of the discworld books like this, and personally I can’t stand it.
I hate so much that this has a 100% chance of happening. Narrator can make a mediocre book shine, or make a good book into a fucking rollercoaster (Andy Serki’s anyone).
AI is not a great narrator. Its character voices are boring, intonations weird, pacing awful. Why would anyone listen to a much worse version of what they could have with a human? I’d rather get amateur narrating it over an autocomplete trying to sound like Morgan Freeman.
Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.
More jobless, desperate people.
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.
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
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.
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!
Oh, goody! I hope they use that TikTok lady’s voice! It’s my favorite!
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.
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.
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 your 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”.
Beautiful, it works. Why not.
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
Is there an offline tool that generates realistic audio for epubs as Mp3 ? Something like the free Ai tool, Vibe which is for transcription. Is there something similar for TTS, runs locally without complicated setup ( most are complicated using python and etc just for installation)
Great question! I need to come back to this thread to see if something is suggested.
I’ve loaded epubs into the app ReadEra, which lets you read it like any other novel app or will, in real time, read it to you. It’s not the most natural of speech, but was good enough for my commute when I was in the midst of a compelling book.
Download TTS Server, and change the engine in Readera to use it. Use the Microsoft Azure settings in TTS, much more realistic. Little slow though is my only complaint as it sends/receives a paragraph at time, resulting in a pause now and again.
How do I do that? Have both readera and tts server on a Samsung Galaxy
Looking for iOS recommendations, preferably without a subscription that can read epub/pdf
I’m an android user, so not sure if it’s on iOS but I’ve used ReadEra
It’s on iOS.
I thought people mainly paid for the large library
I’ve tried one that works surprisingly well. Each sentence had great pacing, cadence, and correct enunciation- even had tone right when someone was shouting or angry or sad.
I wouldn’t really recommend it, though. While I couldn’t pick any single thing out that was wrong, overall it just didn’t quite flow. It’s like watching someone try to act that is technically doing everything right, but it just isn’t good. It basically didn’t understand the greater context of the story and was saying lines.
It was uncanny valley, but exclusively with voice.
