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.

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

This is dumb as hell... if I wanted AI to read a book poorly to me, I'd just use screen reading accessibility features.

trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?

Fucking gross. Maybe it's the 250+ audiobooks I have influencing me, but the very best ones I've listened to transcend just turning words into sound. Sound effects, music, tone, emotion, accents, sarcasm, and god damn BLOOPERS all improve the experience beyond just hearing what is written down.

I'm against it, fuck that literal noise.

It was bound to happen. I'm okay with ones that were never going to be turned into audiobooks to begin with... but they likely will use that as the norm for all books... I guess unless the author/publisher says not to.

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.

It's Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.

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...

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.

youtube already does it.

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."

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 right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.

I am okay with this only in cases where 1) the author approves, and 2) there is no audible version anyways.

Some people prefer listening to their books instead of reading and that's totally ok. Indie authors can't always afford to hire a narrator but I'd still want the buyers to be able to listen to the book.

Big question is, will the author get paid for the download or not...

I hate so much that this has a 100% chance of becoming a norm. Narrator can make a mediocre book shine, or turn a good book into a fucking rollercoaster (Andy Serkis, anyone?)

AI? Not a great narrator. Its character voices are boring, intonations weird, pacing awful. I'd honestly rather get an amateur narrating it for fun, over a robot sounding like a knock-off Morgan Freeman.

AI will write them and AI will read them to us.

Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.

Well that's a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.

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. I am glad I have never even touched the Audible service, now I never will. I will also never consume anything written by a fucking AI.

Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….