this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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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
Ok?
Audiobooks for the deaf? Excuse me?
I meant eye deaf
Sign language books. Now there’s a hole in the market 😆
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
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.
Its not that audible hires the narator themselves more like they just ways of putting writers in Touch with narrators
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.