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Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    Someone can manually go through it and correct and edit it, as one would a regular, human made recording. It's not rocket science exactly. It wouldn't be a story time for children but it would probably be alright for more plain stuff

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    If the "fix" for an AI implementation in a use case is, again, to manually correct it and find a less demanding audience then... yes, by definition it's shitty.

    The point isn't that it's infeasible, just that it will be low quality.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    I mean you have to correct and edit human made stuff too, doesn't mean it's shit lol

    If you want the stuff read out and don't care for the radio type stuff, I'd imagine the better voice AIs do a pretty good job. And I personally prefer the more neutral voices to the story time stuff, so works for me.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    This is me just speculating here but if they follow the path of this CEO who fired his human staff to replace it by AI... then rollback admit it's shit https://gizmodo.com/klarna-hiring-back-human-help-after-going-all-in-on-ai-2000600767 then my bet is that it's not done to improve quality but rather margins.

    If AI is done alongside professionals, and done so ethically (not stolen training data, not ignoring ecological cost by pumping water in dry areas to cool down GPUs, etc) and economically (i.e. not having it "cheap" now but once a monopoly position is obtain, raise prices for a captive set of consumers) then yes it can be potentially empowering. This though is pretty much never the case.

    That being said, if one "just" want read aloud, there are plenty of FLOSS alternatives and I believe Mozilla even a TTS/STT system based solely on voluntary voices.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's a company, of course it's done to increase profits. I'm just saying it being AI doesn't automatically mean it's shit, it could be done just fine. AI is a tool, the end result depends on how that tool is used.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    Like I try to highlight, in most cases it's a shitty tool, doing a bad job, trained on stolen data, requiring a TON of energy and often used to put people out of work (and failing at it, cf news above).

    So... sure, it's "just" a tool and in theory, it can be made the right way and used in a good context.

    It is rarely the case though. Here specifically we are talking about Amazon, a company that has from its inception been built to be a monopoly, relying on AWS a service that is basically destroying the Internet by removing its decentralized nature.

    So... again even if the tool would in theory itself be used the right way, build the right way, the company using that tool is problematic.

    TL;DR: in theory, yes, in practice here, no.

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