Am I glad to have dropped everything Amazon.
I de-audibled my entire library, stored on Audiobookshelf and I’ll only buy audiobooks from libro.fm
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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This consumer says you don't get a red cent then!
It's already a plague on youtube where half of the docu style vids are AI narrated already. I quit them in disgust. It's so frustrating. It has eroded my perception of Youtube in short time.
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.
Well that's a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
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.
Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….
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.
I completely agree. I don't even like it when the human reader clearly doesn't understand what they're saying, so some AI flatly telling me the story isn't going to cut it.
For the humans, someone mispronounced "quay" for example. "La Jolla" was another standout mistake that took me out of the story.
Dude, I know how you feel xD back in 2009 I bought an audio recording of the first Twilight book because I was curious about ehat the fuss was about. It was in Danish, as I am Danish, and the narrator, bless her, had a very Danish way of pronouncing the word "flirting". In Danish we don't have a modern word for flirting so we just use the English one with English pronunciation, but this lady, who already sounded like she was in her 60s, just went full Dane on that word and it completely took me out of the story and had me yell at my ghettoblaster "FLIRTING" everytime she pronounced her mutilated version of that word. I don't even know how to write a phonetic version of what the fuck she said, but I'll try.
Fleert-eh
Fuck me, it's been almost 16 years and just spelling it out made my skin crawl.
I also hated that book, but that wasn't really the narrator's fault. Had to pause the fuck out of it several times and rage clean my apartment. Nobody had told me about how it romanticized abusive relationships and I had JUST gotten out of one of those so to say I was triggered was an understatement. The mispronounciations of flirting were just the garnish on top, lol.
WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT. ROBOTS CAN SHOW EMOTION.
AS A FELLOW HUMAN I APPRECIATE YOUR INSIGHTFUL FEELINGS
The issue is there’s a million books out there with no audio and never will. Im ok with Ai doing readings on books that wouldn’t otherwise get an audio version
Yeah i can see worls of non fiction being a good candidate.
Sure, but it is still lame for a company like Audible to expect people to pay for their service and then they decide to cut costs by switching to AI voices. They can afford to hire actors to read their books. They have no excuse to go do that.
Meanwhile what you're talking about if books and stories that may not get to be picked to be narrated and well, I can see where ai voices could be a benefit in those cases. Especially for people with dyslexia.
I just disagree with a company that sells itself on narrated books and then they go and have robots read their shit? Why should anyone pay for that? Because I'm sure their prices wouldn't go down either.
And when all is said and done, personally, I just prefer that a human being is reading to me. Especially if it is fiction.
Does audible actually do the audiobooks? I assumed it was the publishers. Sometimes the books i want aren’t available on audio which I listen to while working
There are Audible originals that you can only get on their platform. Audiobook sellers like libro.fm and streamers like Storytel don’t get access to those.
I assumed they did. Maybe not all, to be fair, but I am pretty sure they have produced audio recordings of books in the past(?)
Maybe I'm just tripping, I dunno.
Its not that audible hires the narator themselves more like they just ways of putting writers in Touch with narrators
With machine voice with no attempts at imitate human's intonation - yes.
Hey for the deaf and people who need the info on the page, robot voice is better than nothing.
Just pretend the book is being narrated by Stephen Hawking!
Audiobooks for the deaf? Excuse me?
I meant eye deaf
Sign language books. Now there’s a hole in the market 😆
Accessibility and performance art are separate categories
Ok?
Surely I can just do that myself with an an epub and a free AI.
Glad I binned my Audible subscription many years ago.
Save a profile in tts server, then go into read > tts settings and change voice to profile you saved. I don't remember but you may need readera premium.
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...
unironically, that is a character that could use an uncanny robotic AI voice.
The professional ai voices are amazing
trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
This has actually got me thinking differently about AI all together.
The best use for AI needs to be for the individual. I want MY ai to read books or research with or complete tasks for me.
I don’t want another company to do it for me or monetize it or steal content with it.
Yep, copyright doesn't apply to AI generated content.
(edit: the original book copyright would still apply however... So would only be public domain if the book itself was also public domain)
How about I spin up an AI model that outputs a near 1:1 copy of the training data?
Does that circumvent the copyright?
Duno, probably to some extent, similarly to how remixes of music sometimes have to pay royalties to the source of the sample if it's recognisable...?
Actually would probably be more similar to the George Carlin AI impersonation lawsuit , but they settled, so idk.
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It's Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
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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
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