Oh, goody! I hope they use that TikTok lady’s voice! It’s my favorite!
Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks
Submitted 10 months ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
madjo@feddit.nl 10 months ago
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
MiyamotoKnows@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Maxxie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
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.
JigglySackles@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well that’s a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
unphazed@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Save a profile in tts server, then go into read > tts settings and change voice to profile you saved. I don’t remember but you may need readera premium.
ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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 during active speech. And that can be jarring toe at least.
Nangijala@feddit.dk 10 months ago
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.
Fenrisulfir@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
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.
essteeyou@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Nangijala@feddit.dk 10 months ago
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.
But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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
joel_feila@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah i can see worls of non fiction being a good candidate.
Nangijala@feddit.dk 10 months ago
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.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 10 months ago
With machine voice with no attempts at imitate human’s intonation - yes.
Valmond@lemmy.world 10 months ago
WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT. ROBOTS CAN SHOW EMOTION.
lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
AS A FELLOW HUMAN I APPRECIATE YOUR INSIGHTFUL FEELINGS
GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
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…
Anomalocaris@lemm.ee 10 months ago
unironically, that is a character that could use an uncanny robotic AI voice.
Evotech@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The professional ai voices are amazing
utopiah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
Evotech@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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
utopiah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Enshittification isn’t adding new features that people want, it’s gradually lowering the quality of the product. So here is 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!
altphoto@lemmy.today 10 months ago
So you can take the square root of that:
5x+7integral from 5z to 9x derivative of deltaT minus minus multiply times 3. Figure 1
Figure 1 shows a typical lizard living in a square root.
Jhex@lemmy.world 10 months ago
trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 10 months ago
AI voices are not trained on books.
The ethical issue there is more around cloning celebrities
Anomalocaris@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
I3lackshirts94@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Venator@lemmy.nz 10 months ago
Yep, copyright doesn’t apply to AI generated content.
Threeme2189@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
How about I spin up an AI model that outputs a near 1:1 copy of the training data?
Does that circumvent the copyright?
desmosthenes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I like your way of thinking
ExtantHuman@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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
ApatheticCactus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Litebit@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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 using python and etc.
ExtantHuman@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Great question! I need to come back to this thread to see if something is suggested.
Mbourgon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Looking for iOS recommendations, preferably without a subscription that can read epub/pdf
ExtantHuman@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I’m an android user, so not sure if it’s on iOS but I’ve used ReadEra
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I thought people mainly paid for the large library
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Beautiful, it works. Why not.
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Pretty much anything handling unstructed data (audio, video, text) is using training data that has copyrighted content.
drmoose@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.
There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it’s impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
There are thousands of books released every year. That’s impossible to cover even in English alone.
Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.
utopiah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth
I’m pretty sure they’d be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
drmoose@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sure but that’s not how free markets work. If there’s only 3 million consumers you can’t afford 3 million voice actors but you can afford 3 million AI renders.
DNU@lemmy.world 10 months ago
but for a service like audible.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
And you think anyone is training AI voice models for those languages? Have you even seen how long it takes even large companies like Google to support the languages with hundreds of millions of speakers?
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
That’s the benefit of using AI and machine learning - once you have enough source material, you can throw it all in and it’ll eventually spit out a model.
Which is exactly what Meta did with their Massively Multilingual Speech project which supports text -to-speech and speech-to-text for 1107 different languages.Is it actually any good in 99% of them, I don’t have a clue, but it exists.
drmoose@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It becomes easier and cheaper every day. Today’s open source LLMs are better than last year’s best model.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 10 months ago
youtube already does it.
futatorius@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 10 months ago
like how fans got obssessed with AI generated DBZ(what ifs)
mlen@awful.systems 10 months ago
And it’s shit
Breezy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Jack_Burton@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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?
echodot@feddit.uk 10 months ago
My experience is these systems never get the intonation and stresses right. It drives me nuts and I can’t listen to it.
Breezy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
DeceasedPassenger@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.
Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
This is dumb as hell… if I wanted AI to read a book poorly to me, I’d just use screen reading accessibility features.
Anamnesis@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Are there any good ones nowadays that don’t sound like a robot?
thiseggowaffles@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
Speechify is probably the best option.
venusaur@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sure there are. ElevenLabs is one. You can probably tell they’re not human but they’re really decent.
knightly@pawb.social 10 months ago
No
Jimmycakes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I only get the ones with a famous narrator or the author.
tatann@lemm.ee 10 months ago
AI can mimic those :/
Ilixtze@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
echodot@feddit.uk 10 months ago
I wish I didn’t have to go with audible, I am acutely aware that I don’t really own the audiobooks and they could be taken off the platform at any time.
I wish there was some other option but I don’t know of any other audiobook providers. They have the industry locked down.
potoo22@programming.dev 10 months ago
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.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I’m not sure why AI would automatically mean it’s doing a shitty job.
utopiah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Because… the tool has no understanding of anything? It reads written words, yes, but no intention, no cultural context, no intonation. Unless everything is spelled out like a script, then it will not sound great, would it?
48954246@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Nick Podehl is such an amazing narrator. The voices and performance are amazing.
I’ve been slowly getting through the Kel Kade books and the narration just makes it for me
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The thing with this is that there won’t be shitty narrations any more. Hate it all you may, fact of the matter is that AI-powered voice generation is pretty good at what it does. So in the future you won’t have shitty narrations and great narrations. You’ll have decent narrations and great (human) narrations.
ExperiencedWinter@lemmy.world 10 months ago
And teslas will have full self driving tomorrow and crypto currency will replace normal currency within one year! Always believe in the hype!
FancyPantsFIRE@lemm.ee 10 months 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.
tal@lemmy.today 10 months ago
AI voice synth is pretty solid, and I think that there are good uses for it — e.g. filling in for an aging actor/actress who can’t do a voice any more, video game mods, procedurally-generated speech, etc — but audiobooks don’t really play to those strengths. I’m a little skeptical that in 2025, it’s at the point where it’s a good drop-in replacement for audio books. What I’ve heard still doesn’t have emphasis on par with a human.
I don’t know what it costs to have a human read an audiobook, but I can’t imagine that it’s that expensive; I doubt that there’s all that much editing involved.
kagis
reddit.com/…/whats_the_average_narrator_cost/
So I produced my own audiobooks for my Nova Roma series so I know the exact numbers for you:
$250 per finished hour for the narrator. Books ranged from about 200k words-270k words, which came out to 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours.
So books 1-3 cost me $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250. I’m contracted for two more books with my narrator, so I expect to spend another 5k-6k for each of those.
So for a five book series, each one 200k+ words, the total cost out of pocket for me will be about $27,000 give or take to make the series into audiobooks.
That’s actually lower than I expected, but point stands. Like, if a book sells at any kind of volume, it can’t be that hard to make that back.
Kookie215@lemmy.world 10 months ago
AI will write them and AI will read them to us.
riskable@programming.dev 10 months ago
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.”
Claire@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
prefer listening to real voice…