this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (8 children)

This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.

There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it's impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.

There are thousands of books released every year. That's impossible to cover even in English alone.

Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.

In fact since AI moat is so minimal this will very quickly be adapted by open source solution providing audio book access to millions if not billions of people to whom this was not an option. Its amazing.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 17 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 17 hours ago

And it's shit

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Why would they when you can just plug any epub into a program and use google tts. Ive listened to about a book a day for the past few years doing this and i love it. Yeah it took getting used too, but once you find an ai voice you like and figure out which words to auto replace to sound right its honestly better then an audiobook. Well at least to me it is, i could never stand when the reader would change their voice for different characters.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

My experience is these systems never get the intonation and stresses right. It drives me nuts and I can't listen to it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

Idk how much experience you have with this type of thing, but when I listen to my books i use my imagination to picture and hear things the way i want just like when i read a book normally. Ive read well over a 1000 books doing so, and that doesnt count rereads, and having the ability and willingness to use this method has drastically increased the amount i read but also my enjoyment doing so. The app i use also allows me to edit words and phrases throughput the book where i can correct how things are pronounced. Hell there's a series that has this stupid catchphrase that i completely removed from all 20 books cause it was annoying. Im sure im only a single person that likes this method, but if i can find it enjoyable then when real ai gets put to work it'll capture others.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 21 hours ago

Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago

More jobless, desperate people.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

Are there any good ones nowadays that don't sound like a robot?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

Sure there are. ElevenLabs is one. You can probably tell they’re not human but they’re really decent.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

They still don't understand the context of what they're reading though so they can't apply tone correctly.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 18 hours ago
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