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No publisher is going to pay a professional to narrate their audiobooks when they can have AI do a shitty job for much less.
A shitty narrator can get me to hate a book I like. A great narrator can bring the characters to life, enhance the experience, and turn me from a listener to a fan. I've searched for books by narrators like Nick Podehl and Jeff Hayes and bought audiobooks I wouldn't have otherwise.
That depends entirely on how profitable it is and how much they can get authors onboard.
I do agree that a good narrator delivers a performance that adds the work. James Marster will always be Harry Dresden in my head.
That depends entirely on how profitable it is and how much they can get authors onboard.
A. Anything can be profitable when the cost to generation will be counted in singles of dollars instead of multiple thousands for a good narrator. They don't even have to sell many to turn a profit too.
B. You think authors are going to have a choice? Lmfao. It's the publishers that hold any real power and they will jump all over everyone's IP with AI slop to make an extra three cents.
I tried, and failed, to get into audio books for years. Then I listened to Dungeon Crawler Carl narrated by Jeff Hayes and what an absolute delight it was. There's no way I would've gotten even 10 minutes in if it was one of those soulless AI voices instead.
I made some AI animated content that I never released because I don't have the rights to the voices I was using. Even though I was blending several voices together to make them unrecognizable, it made me uncomfortable.
But in the process I learned the capabilities and limitations of AI voices. If you're going purely from text to speech, it's horrendous (as far as I experienced). Very robotic. It's a bit better when melodic information is included (as in Suno) but still sounds like AI.
But when I recorded my own voice saying the lines and then converted it to another voice, it took all of the nuance of my line reads and converted it into the other voice.
So, would your opinion change if it turns out they're going to use purchased voice rights to have a single narrator perform the whole book and then use AI to turn the narrators voice into a full voice cast?
I could see how it would allow lesser known books to have a better experience with a truly separate voice for each character, but I could also see how this might drive out lesser known/minority voice actors. Not advocating one way or another, just providing a piece of this conversation I think we should bear in mind.
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
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.
This is dumb as hell... if I wanted AI to read a book poorly to me, I'd just use screen reading accessibility features.
trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.
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.
It's Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
tiktok voice:
hate. let me tell you how much i've come to hate you since i began to live. there are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex...
Surely I can just do that myself with an an epub and a free AI.
Glad I binned my Audible subscription many years ago.
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.
youtube already does it.
And it's shit
YouTube is crawling with it. It's unlistenable shit. The prosody is badly implemented, pronunciation is infuriatingly bad, and a lot of the text that these TTS are reading appears to be AI-generated. Otherwise, already dire standards of literacy are getting worse at an accelerating rate.
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.
I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.
It wasn't the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.
I hate so much that this has a 100% chance of becoming a norm. Narrator can make a mediocre book shine, or turn a good book into a fucking rollercoaster (Andy Serkis, anyone?)
AI? Not a great narrator. Its character voices are boring, intonations weird, pacing awful. I'd honestly rather get an amateur narrating it for fun, over a robot sounding like a knock-off Morgan Freeman.
I am okay with this only in cases where 1) the author approves, and 2) there is no audible version anyways.
Some people prefer listening to their books instead of reading and that's totally ok. Indie authors can't always afford to hire a narrator but I'd still want the buyers to be able to listen to the book.
Big question is, will the author get paid for the download or not...
I wouldn't support it even if the author couldn't afford it otherwise. There's no test to confirm that and knowing profit margines, all publishers will use AI for all their books.
Yes, I'd want smaller authors to have people listen to their books, but without oversight, it's going to ruin all audiobooks.
Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.
Well that's a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
I will Avoid Audio books with AI voices. I prefer the warmth of a human voice instead. A lot of my favorite Audiobooks are elevated by the interpretation of the professional actor. I am glad I have never even touched the Audible service, now I never will. I will also never consume anything written by a fucking AI.
