Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks
Uli@sopuli.xyz 22 hours agoI 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.
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?
It would make me hate it even more because I already hate the existing full cast of humans audio dramas 99% of the time and actually prefer a single (or low number of) narrator approach.
Completely fair. I kind of like them. They did it for Redwall and I listen to those books on long drives sometimes. It works for me. Now I guess the advantage could be to have both versions and get to choose which you listen to–but even I’m skeptical that a corporation would have that much regard for the preferences of its consumers.
Oh. That’s an interesting use-case I hadn’t considered.
Kornblumenratte@feddit.org 18 hours ago
Using different voices to read different parts of a book turns an audiobook into a bad audio play, and arguably, a bad audio play is worse than a mediocre audio book.
What audible misses is, that, while reading is a technique that can be automated, narrating is an art. They can use AI to read books, they cannot use AI to narrate books.
Your example of AI use is a good example of this: AI can read your content. AI can enhance your capabilities. But only you can narrate it.