Comment by laserbeam

> On the other, some of my favorite audio books all stood out because the narrator was interpreting the text really well

This (and everything else with AI) isn't saying "you don't need good actors any more". It's saying "if you don't have an audiobook, you can make a mediocre one automatically".

AI (text, images, videos, whatever) doesn't replace the top end, it replaces the entire bottom-to-middle end.

I wholeheartedly agree. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Briggs got me hooked on Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I loved "Going Postal".

Absolutely.

Even on the non-fiction side, the narration for Gleick's The Information adds something.

While I want this tool for all the stuff with no narration, NYT/New Yorker/etc replacing human narrators with AI ones has been so shitty. The human narrators sound good, not just average. They add something. The AI narrators are simply bad.

I agree with you, but also want to point out:

New authors, self-publishers, can't afford tens of thousands of dollars to get an audiobook recorded professionally... This can limit their distribution.

Authors might even choose not to make such version (or lack confidence to record themselves), so AI capable of making a decently passable version would be nice -- something more than reading text blandly. AI in theory could attempt to track the scene and adjust.

Yes, but if the alternative is not having a book, or having to listen to one poorly read (I love Librivox, but there are some books which I just haven't been able to finish because of readers, and many more which were nixed for family vacation travel listening on that account), this may be workable.

With this technology, one could produce high quality audio books without having access to high quality narrators by annotating the books with the voice, speed and such things.

I wonder if a standardized markup exists to do so.

I guess this is still very useful if you are blind.

Agree with you on this.

My example, I was never a Wheel of Time fan, but the new audio editions done by Rosamund Pike are quite the performance, and make me like the story. She brings all the characters to life in a way thats different than just reading. It's a true performance.

I guess using different narrators is essential for both fiction and non-fiction books if you want the full experience. Personally, I love it when audiobooks have narrators who stick to the characters’ personalities—it just feels right. Some of the audiobooks I’ve listened to have narrators who switch up their voices for each character, and others even use a different narrator for every character, which gets really good. Narration Box has been doing a really great job with this lately

A couple of my favorite audiobooks are Stranger in a Strange Land and Flowers for Algernon where the performer changes the intonation and enunciation of main character with the character’s journey and it was a revelation and made me appreciate the stories in a way I did not get reading the printed books the first time. Just the consistency of the performance is sometimes difficult to do in my imagination perhaps.

A GenAI model that read audiobooks with such dramatisation is really my dream. There are so many books that I would want to listen to, but still lack such an adaptation. Also it takes months after the book release before the audiobook gets released.

Just imagine what this would do for writers. They can get instant feedback and adjust their book for the audiobook.

I agree but the opposite can be true too. Sometimes the narrator seems to target some general audience that doesn’t fit me at all, in a way that makes me cringe when I listen, until I stop listening altogether. In these cases I’d rather listen to a relatively flat narration from a tool like this.

Would a "better" AI would do a "better" narration with a better understanding of the text? Of course that it would imply a different (and far bigger?) model.

Anyway, even if in theory it might, in practice things may end even worse than doing it with a monotone voice.

On the other hand, there are a lot of narrators who are just bad, and the publisher is not going to pay for an alternate narration. These tools are a good way to re-narrate Wil Wheaton narrated books with correct pronunciation and inflection, for example.

Computer chess took a long time to get better than the best players in the world, but it was better than most chess players for many years before that. We're seeing that a lot with these generative models.

I like one speaker in one particular book.

He also narrates another scifi book series and honestly I dislike this a lot.

He became the voice of one particular character for me.

I would love variety