Comment by satvikpendem 2 days ago
Why a human? There are many cases where I like a book but dislike the audiobook speaker, so I essentially can't listen to that book anymore. With a machine, I can tweak the voice to my heart's content.
Sometimes, I don't care if it's bland, I just want to listen to the text. There are a lot of Asian light novels for example which never get English audiobooks, and I've listened to many of them with basic TTS, not even an AI model TTS like these more recent ones, and I thoroughly enjoyed these books even still.
And get a completely wrong/bland but custom read of the book. Reading is much more than simply transforming text to audio.