Audiobooks

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40,000 AI-narrated audiobooks flood Audible, dividing authors and listeners (www.techspot.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I definitely do not want to support this practice, but there's no way to filter these out 😠.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

I listened to one of the Audible samples, labeled Virtual Voice. Apple had one labeled as "Madison," so who knows whether they're all going to be labeled so clearly.

It sounded like a TikTok narrator, passable but at the quality level I would expect from a Netflix second-screen show. The book was at the same quality level, too. (The author does "life and business coaching with innovative and adaptable strategies, transcending traditional boundaries.")

I consider these kinds of books and narration to be slop, so I'm definitely not the target market. My worry is that publishers will use AI narrators as virtual scabs to lowball actual creators.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I don't think I would like them at all. I had the audiobooks for a whole series by one author, and they were all read by the same narrator except the latest book. I couldn't handle it; it was a real person, not AI, but they were just terrible (but still better than an AI-generated voice).

Did it do distinct voices for the characters? I could maybe see biographies being tolerable read my a machine (though ironic), but books with multiple characters interacting would be a mess. That's one of the things I appreciate about John Lee (who narrated almost that entire series). He even used the same voices for the same characters across books.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

I don't know about distinct voices. The sample didn't cover dialogue. It's possible with AI, but I wouldn't expect it from low-effort AI-generation.